The Clinton Old Guard in the Democratic Party is not backing Berniecrats in elections even if it means Republicans win

 

OXFORD, Miss. – Thousands cheered back in March when Bernie Sanders stood on the podium at the “March on Mississippi” in Canton, Mississippi, and told them “the eyes of the country and the eyes of the world are on you!”

           

The Vermont senator and unsuccessful Democratic presidential contender was the big draw of that event, and his presence indeed put a national spotlight on the longstanding struggle of Nissan workers in Canton to be able to have an intimidation-free union election.

“One worker has zero power,” Sanders said, “but when workers stand together, you have power. There is a reason why large multinational corporations have come to the South. They’re told workers in the South will not stand up. It’s a race to the bottom. Our job is to tell Corporate America they cannot have it all.”

If the eyes of the nation and world were on Canton that day, were the eyes of the national Democratic Party?

It’s unlikely, a great irony when you consider how organized labor has been the party’s most stalwart supporter since before Franklin Roosevelt.

Under the leadership of the Democratic National Committee and its new chair, Tom Perez, today’s party looks backward, not forward. Its eyes are still searching for excuses for its miserable failure in the 2016 presidential election.

Why? The Clinton wing still rules the DNC, and thus the endless groaning about alleged Russian interference in the election rather than the soul searching it needs to move forward.

The party has poured more than $8 million into Democrat Jon Ossoff’s congressional bid in a wealthy suburban Atlanta district in Georgia. Ossoff is the classic Clinton Democrat--a darling of Hollywood celebrities who is fluent in French and studied at the London School of Economics and Georgetown University. He’s also hoping to win conservative support by talking about cutting $16 billion in “wasteful spending” out of the federal budget.

In other words, he’s not a Bernie Sanders kind of guy who can easily work a crowd of blue-collar assembly line workers—whether it’s Mississippi, Michigan, Ohio or Minnesota. Yet many of those are among the folks who used to vote solidly Democratic but turned to Donald Trump last November because at least he talked about issues important to them.

The DNC had a chance last month to support such a candidate in Kansas, James Thompson, a progressive populist in the Bernie Sanders style who was running for Congress in a special election. What did the DNC do? Practically nothing. Thompson had a real shot in the election but lost after getting only token support from the Democratic Party bigwigs.

The same was true in populist Democrat Rob Quist’s congressional campaign in Montana, where he got a groundswell of support from voters during the campaign but little from the national Democratic Party in face of a Republican juggernaut to defeat him. Quist lost the election to Republican Greg Gianforte.

“By refusing to fund the campaigns of anyone but centrist, establishment shills, the Democratic Party aims to make the Berniecrats’ lack of political viability a self-fulfilling prophecy,” The Guardian’s Jamie Peck wrote recently. “Starve their campaigns of resources so they can’t win, then point to said losses as examples of why they can’t win.”

DNC Chair Perez won his position after defeating Keith Ellison, the candidate supported by Sanders. His two predecessors, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile, both resigned amid allegations of supporting and using their positions to push for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.

Meanwhile, Sanders continues to rally young people and blue-collar workers around the country in an effort offer future voters a real choice in the next election. He has launched an interview show broadcast on Facebook that allows for serious discussion of issues that matter to Americans in their day-to-day lives. In other words, something other than tired conspiracy theories about last November’s election.

Among Sanders’ guests has been the Rev. William Barber, leader of North Carolina’s “Moral Monday” movement and that state’s NAACP president. Barber is one of the most dynamic social justice activists in the country today, the kind of fiery supporter of civil rights and labor that used to be the heart of the Democratic Party.

The Barber broadcast got nearly a million viewers. Another show featuring science educator and global warming critic Bill Nye was watched by 4.5 million viewers. Who were these watchers? Most of them ranged in age from 18 to 45.

Hillary Clinton thought she could win the 2016 presidential race on the same politics of her husband, a politics that seems liberal on the surface—pro-choice, multicultural, racially sensitive—but which is just as wedded to Wall Street, big banks, and race-to-the-bottom corporations as your garden variety Republican.

Bernie Sanders offered a different vision in 2016, and the party under whose banner he campaigned did what it could to undermine him. It’s a vision that still inspires many and gives them hope, but don’t expect the Democratic old guard to be among them.

  

A shorter version of this column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press of Jackson, Mississippi.