Yay, Hillary! Okay, that is not something I say easily or often, but our gal’s five to zero sweep of the March 15 primaries over not so smokin’ Bernie Sanders, including a 2 to 1 beatdown in Florida, was welcome news indeed. Bernie’s big mouth had infused enough new blood in the beast known as paleo-liberalism that the creature was getting all ambulatory on our ass and set to walk among us when brave little Hillary put both Bernie and the beast down for the count.
Because, seriously, what was the deal with Bernie Sanders? Was he like the dumbest Jew ever? A guy who thought that Nixon shouldn’t have initiated diplomatic relations with China (which, twenty years later, helped end the Cold War, a pretty good pay-off, in my opinion) because it led to, you know, made in China bobblehead dolls in the souvenir shop of the U.S. Senate? This was a candidate?
One of the worst effects of Sander’s candidacy was that it gave the paleo-liberals an excuse to re-litigate all their old grudges against Bill Clinton as a way of attacking Hillary. The florid fantasies of the paleo-libs was well on display last Sunday, when Thomas Frank blossomed forth with “Bill Clinton’s odious presidency”, an odorous offering that sought to rewrite, and, ultimately, overwrite, the history of the Clinton years. This still-born manifesto can serve as an historical memento for everything that was wrong with the paleo-libs—their fetishizing of anything that smacked of trade-unionism, their conviction that all trade agreements are somehow “lose/lose” arrangements that beggar all participants—except the big shots, of course—and their belief that the value of any government program could be measured by the amount of money that it handed out to black people, or “persons of color” as they unctuously liked to put it.
Frank does have one argument that’s almost half as effective as he believes it to be—Clinton’s “tough on crime” policies that helped swell America’s prison population beyond all reason. However, he leaves out a few details that should be remembered, to wit: as many have pointed out, black communities, plagued by high crime rates, often supported Clinton’s policies; 2) it was the decisions of local prosecutors, largely in response to political pressure, to pursue “tough on crime” policies that were responsible for the lion’s share of the increase in the prison population. Clinton didn’t stand against the largely irrational obsession with “toughness”—Clinton was rarely one to stand on principle—but neither did any one else.
Despite all his losses, of course, Bernie Sanders isn’t going away. He’s got plenty of money, and an audience that’s surely a hundred times the size of any he’s had before, and one that’s almost a tenth of the size of the one he thinks he deserves. So you’ll be hearing a lot more from Bernie Sanders these days. If you care to listen.
