Hillary Clinton vs. Bernie Sanders: The Good Fight
Hillary Clinton’s Super Tuesday speech, delivered before a gathering of supporters in Miami, was a more polished version of a speech I’d heard her give three days earlier in Columbia, South Carolina. The Columbia rally took place at an indoor volleyball court at the University of South Carolina. The floor of the gymnasium had been covered with a blue tarp, possibly to protect the wood, but also maybe to hide the name of the team, the Gamecocks, and its mascot, a giant red cockfighting rooster, complete with sharpened spurs on its legs.
By this point in the Democratic primary season, Clinton was exuding a new confidence onstage. Her opponent, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, had proved unexpectedly formidable, thanks to the resonance of his populist economic message. But Clinton, who has acknowledged she’s not a “natural” campaigner, sharpened her message and delivery after early stumbles. While Sanders had been dominating when it came to one portion of the Obama coalition, young people, Clinton had done even better with another, African-Americans, to such a degree that the math was starting to look ugly for Sanders. She would win South Carolina and the Southern Super Tuesday states – Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, Georgia and Virginia – by massive, ridiculous margins, leaving her with a considerable lead. For Sanders to bounce back, he’d have to start racking up some game-changing numbers of his own. (The following week, Sanders squeaked out a win in Michigan in a wild upset, but continued to trail significantly in delegates.)
The one big advantage Sanders retained was financial: The campaign had just announced it had taken in $42.7 million in February, more than Clinton for the second month in a row – and this with no help from Super PACs. Ninety-eight percent of the money was raised online from small donors, most of whom were nowhere near the maximum personal-donation limit of $2,700, and so could continue to support the Sanders insurgency all the way through the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. To that end, even if Sanders fell short on delegates, there was no real incentive for him to drop out.
While the Republican primary descended into puerile name-calling, racism and open flirtations with fascism, the heated contest of ideas between Clinton and Sanders – policy-driven, free of personal insults and game-raising for both candidates – felt almost jarring, its decency and intelligence unfolding like an alternate universe. Even if Sanders does not prevail, he will have forced Clinton and the Democratic establishment to at least respond to a grassroots fury and disgust over the political elite and the financial interests controlling the debate. Suddenly, long-sought-after progressive dreams like single-payer health care and free tuition for public colleges had re-entered the political conversation.
By Super Tuesday, Clinton was already looking ahead to the general election, telling reporters at a coffee shop in Minneapolis that she was troubled by the “bigotry and bullying” she’d been hearing from Republican candidates and was disappointed that Donald Trump “did not disavow what appears to be support from David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.” That night in her victory speech, Clinton circled back to the GOP front-runner, noting that “we need more love and kindness in America.”
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