Why not Bernie.

 What do you know about Bernie that I don't? Is it that he simply doesn't have a chance or what?

I've written and discarded three full blog posts over the last two months on why I'm inclined to support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. This version has taken me a week... and it started out as a simple reply comment on Facebook. Part of the delay: it's not an easy decision. I know and respect too many sensible Sanders supporters (like my husband), and am influenced by their thinking. But also: I don't want to tear down a candidate who might be the party's nominee and whom I would still vote for in a general.

I suppose you'd call me a "Hillarealist" in that I think Clinton can win a general election and Sanders can't (for reasons I’ve discussed before HERE and HERE). But unlike those alleged “Democrats who would love to line up behind Bernie’s sunny ideals but know that he just isn’t electable,” I wouldn’t. By the time I get a chance to cast my vote, 38 other states and territories will have gone first. I don’t believe my vote will make much of a difference at that point so I’m free to vote my conscience, and barring something unexpected, I'm voting for Clinton.

I like Clinton, but writing a post about that would take me months to finish. So I'm answering the easier question instead: why not Bernie?

I don’t know any former Clinton staffers so it’s not a fair sample, but I know (and respect) a handful of former Sanders staffers. I haven’t yet found one who plans to vote for him. In fact, one wrote to me that "Bernie would be a horrible chief executive skill-wise" and that he, the staffer, "couldn't in good conscience vote for Bernie."

I was having a conversation awhile ago with a consumer advocate who opposed the nomination of Robert Califf to head the FDA because of his close ties to industry. She rattled off with enthusiasm the senators with a hold on the nom and then said, belatedly, "oh and Sanders, of course, not that that will help."

"Why?" I asked, "Because he's tied up in the campaign?"

"Not really, more because he's never been able to bring anyone along with him. He'll give a speech, vote, disappear but he doesn't actually change anyone's mind or get their votes, not even the progressive senators. It's more about the appearance of the fight than making substantive change." She wasn't trying to persuade me, just sharing her on-the-ground day-in-day-out view of the senator.

So that's one part of it. I haven’t yet heard an anecdote from colleagues here that makes me think, now this is a man who can govern. I haven’t yet reviewed a debate that makes me think, now this is a man who will think seriously about those issues that he just doesn’t care about. Sometimes "the establishment" can mean "moneyed interests, backroom negotiators, cigar smoke" and I'm sympathetic with everyone who's disgusted with the corporatist tendencies of both parties. But sometimes "establishment" also just means "people who know what they're talking about." When the people who've seen Bernie in action aren't voting for him, that influences my thinking.

That's not to say that I have no concerns about Clinton. Money matters, and I'm not quite as quick to dismiss concerns about her Wall Street speaking fees or campaign donations as some of her other supporters. Yes, Obama and Gore were the recipients of similar largesse from this sector, but then, I've pretty much always been concerned that Democratic administrations are overrun by revolving-door Goldman Sachs types. I'll never forget when Gene Sperling spoke to the early morning Democratic Budget Group in the House during the height of the recession. He didn't even try to hide his sympathies with the bankers. He was horrified that Congress would consider blocking bonuses at bailed out firms; meanwhile, he expected car dealers facing closures as part of the auto bailout to suck it up and take one for the team.

If you want proof of just how much money matters, look no further than Elizabeth Warren's cynical support for the medical device industry and her vote for that same industry-friendly Califf who so alarms the consumer protection world. Meanwhile, DINO Joe Manchin of West Virginia opposed Califf "because of his strong ties to the pharmaceutical industry." (OMG!)

Paradoxically, this influences my vote for Clinton: I just don't put a lot of stock in progressive saviors. I don't mean that every politician is the same. Obviously, on 99 issues out of 100, I'd take Warren over Manchin. But I also can't work myself up to the fever pitch that seems to be a prerequisite for feeling the Bern.

And Sanders, of course, sympathizes with gun manufacturers and the NRA. Warren stands up for BIO, Clinton speaks for Wall Street... Pick your poison—not only on what matters most to you, but also on where a president will have the most power.

For me that points to Clinton. It's highly unlikely that Clinton will be able to pack the Treasury Department with bankers in the same way that her husband and Pres. Obama were able to.* In the last few years alone, Obama has lost several high-profile battles to Warren (for the record, I like Warren), who successfully blocked Larry Summers from becoming Fed Chair and Antonio Weiss from becoming the third-ranking official at Treasury. And the success of 'Washington Consensus'-style trade deals is no longer assured. (I may be putting too much faith in Peter Beinart, but I still find his conclusion here compelling, and I distill it to: there is a political limit to how much Clinton can afford to ignore the Left on economics. It's the zeitgeist, stupid.)

On the other hand, there is opportunity for much more aggressive executive action on many of the issues I care about that Sanders doesn't deem that important, like gun control. Right now, the federal government is barred from even studying gun violence. The federal government is barred from releasing data when crimes are committed with guns, the FBI is required to destroy gun purchase records within 24 hours, the ATF can't force gun dealers to report when their inventory is lost or stolen, and more. Background check loopholes are a mile wide. And gun manufacturers are shielded from lawsuits like few other industries. Because freedom. How much can be solved through executive order? I don't know. But I know that Sanders is unlikely to try.

This is "Bernie Sanders on gun policy" from his campaign website: "Bernie believes that gun control is largely a state issue. ... How does Bernie believe we should address mass shootings and other gun-related violence? Bernie believes that we have a crisis in addressing mental health issues in this country." I'm pretty sure that was taken verbatim from Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign.

I've now spent far more time on guns than I intended to in this post. But it's just one of many issues that Sanders doesn't seem to understand or care about.

And therein lies my frustration with him: Bernie's main (and perhaps, only) lens is an economic one, and I agree with his critiques of Wall Street, Big Money, and the need for campaign finance reform.  But his economic lens is too small to cope with the real world and its messy intersections of race, class, gender, orientation, identification, and more. And, disturbingly to me, he doesn't seem to be aware of its limitations—nor do many of this supporters.**

In an excellent piece last year, Matthew Yglesias unwittingly made the case against Bernie Sanders for me when he wrote (on a totally different subject):

The implication … is that somehow an identity is something only women or African-Americans or perhaps LGBT people have. White men just have ideas about politics that spring from a realm of pure reason, with concerns that are by definition universal. … The truth is that almost all politics is, on some level, about identity. But those with the right identities have the privilege of simply calling it politics while labeling other people's agendas "identity."

Bernie Sanders has one solution for every problem that ails this country, and it is a solution perfectly tailored to struggling white, middle- and working-class men, while doing nothing about the numerous non-economic barriers that stack the deck against women and people of color.

Let me be clear, I don't mean that women and people of color wouldn't benefit from Bernie's economic policies—if his policies had a chance of being enacted, that is. I am 100% pro-New Deal. But I'll say it again, his economic policies won't do anything about the numerous non-economic barriers that stack the deck.

And Bernie doesn't seem to know it. Stealing Yglesias's formulation, Bernie believes his politics spring from a realm of pure reason, with concerns that are by definition universal. He's been consistently dismissive of (other people's) "identity politics" as irrelevant. His 1986 run for governor against the incumbent, Madeleine Kunin, is instructive. According to the New York Times' coverage of the race at the time, Kunin was "a liberal Democrat" who "passed tough new environmental legislation." Kunin herself recalls:

When Sanders was my opponent [in 1986] he focused like a laser beam on “class analysis,” in which “women’s issues” were essentially a distraction from more important issues. ... By any measure I was regarded as a progressive governor. If I was vulnerable, it was for being too liberal. As a legislator, my maiden speech on the floor of the Vermont House was in favor of ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. My first priority as governor was universal access to kindergarten. I set a record for a Vermont governor’s appointees; women filled half of my cabinet. I sought out talented women, many of whom were the first women to head their agencies. ...

But none of that mattered to Sanders. Again, from the Times:

[Sanders] insisted that there was little difference between Governor Kunin and her Republican opponent, so voters should not worry about his helping in a Republican victory. ''It is absolutely fair to say you are dealing with Tweedledum and Tweedledee,'' he said. 

That, in a nutshell, is his line of attack against Clinton now. Her long history of fighting for women in the policy arena and of promoting women to positions of authority is irrelevant. He gets to define who is and isn't a true progressive. And time and again he makes clear that, quote-unquote, "women's issues" aren't important.

This was his answer in January when asked how his presidency would help women:

I believe that - and it's not only women, although it impacts women and women of color even greater, this level of pay inequality, inequity, is extraordinary.  So we're going to fight for pay equity, make sure that everybody earns the same amount for the same work.

Also, what we have got to do is people cannot make it on 8, 9, 10 bucks an hour.  We have got to raise the minimum wage in this country to a living wage.  That will impact all people.  It will impact women more than men as we raise the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour. ...

I believe that we should expand Social Security benefits by lifting the cap on taxable income. That will help millions of low-income seniors, especially women.

Sure, I believe in raising the minimum wage and eliminating the cap. But that's not an answer that makes me think, gee, this guy can really relate to the experience of being a young Texan woman desperately researching "how to self-abort" because every abortion clinic in her state has been regulated out of existence, this guy will fight to ensure that drugs prescribed to women aren't only tested on men, this guy will fill key roles in his administration with qualified women (unlike his all-male senior campaign team) because he actually understands why that's important.

I happened to be halfway through writing an iteration of this several weeks ago when I stumbled on this Janell Ross column in the Post dissecting Sanders' panacea using race instead of gender: 

Castro believed the island's effective pigmentocracy could be toppled with class-eliminating, inequality busting policy. ... Communism and an infrastructure of socialist, anti-inequality programs—according to Castro and many others who share his political views today—could and did render peoples' racial backgrounds devoid of meaning.

That is an assessment of modern Cuba that almost any observer would have to declare untrue. And it is an instructive example when it comes to self-described democratic socialist and presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Sanders has managed to attract a very white, very young voter base that, by all measures, appears excited and convinced that Sanders's prescription of inequality busting, billionaire-humbling policy will fix all that is wrong with America. ...

What Sanders has really said and done most reliably since his campaign began in April—even at times that cannot be described as fitting or ideal—is make the case for economic and education policies which he insists will narrow or eliminate economic inequality, thereby taking care of non-white America's "real problems." That, and an organized effort to end the influence of "billionaire class" in elections and lawmaking will do the job, according to Bernie. ...

It is as if the campaign believes that voters—particularly voters of color—are supposed to reorder their priorities to align with Sanders'. They are to simply suspend their own knowledge of their own experiences with the real and continued meaning of race, the persistence of pervasive racial and ethnic stereotypes, and the policy that this combination has spawned. All of that, quite frankly, is far easier to do when a voter is white.

Sanders has many black voters. (I wrote that so you wouldn't jump down my throat.) But no matter how you frame it—

And my favorite framing comes via ThinkProgress: "Clinton secured just 65 percent of Michigan’s African American vote." Emphasis mine because "just" 2/3 of the black vote?—

his message is clearly resonating much more strongly with white voters than minority voters. (Btw, I have an idea as to why his demo skews so young, but it's condescending and you wouldn't like it.)

In January, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote:

This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates. … Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty.

Coates, incidentally, has found his way to supporting Sanders based on Clinton's support for the '94 crime bill signed by her husband, so I'm not including the passages above as some kind of assertion that I know how African Americans should vote. (White girl from Utah, here.)

Rather, I'm including those articles because they speak to my experiences as a woman who works in policy and knows that good policy is much more complicated than anything I've heard Bernie Sanders say.

As Ross alludes to and I've tried to highlight, every answer Sanders gives pivots back to his version of economics that is cast as "universal" but isn't. I know the rule of politics is 'stay on message' and 'answer the question you wished you were asked, not the one you were asked.' But almost a year in I'm starting to realize, he just has nothing else to say.

It makes for great politics. But for a good president? I say not.

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FOOTNOTES:

*As an aside, I personally detest Bill Clinton, though for me that has more to do with the entirely plausible accusations of sexual assault. And, sorry-not-sorry, but I don't think you get any say in how a wife should respond when her husband is accused and I don't care what you think that means for Hillary's feminist bona fides. Walk a mile in her heels first.

But that's not the point of this asterisk. This is: I'm not as quick as other progressives to blame Hillary Clinton for positions she took in the '90s.

After three brutal losses in '80, '84, and '88, one of two things was going to happen: the party was going to give up on winning the White House altogether (the path Republicans seem to have chosen now) or someone was going to shift the party to meet the moment. I can recoil in horror at the Republicans' current hara kiri refusal to respond to the country as it is, not as they wish it were, or I can castigate the DLC for having done the opposite, but I can't do both.

Recall that Paul Tsongas ran to the right of Clinton in '92, positioning himself as the race's pro-business Democrat focused on debt reduction. It was only later that Clinton co-opted Tsongas' messaging. Recall too that his sharpest turn to the right on economics came only after the devastating mid-term losses of '94. I really detest these certain Clinton-era policies (welfare "reform," Gramm–Leach–Bliley, the crime bill) but you can't strip them of their context. So where does the blame fall? On the politician who responded to the realities of the Reagan Revolution or to the voters who created the reality?

**That's not the piece I'd intended to link to, but it's damn good, particularly this line: "She links the 'BernieBro' phenomenon to the fact that progressive men prefer to focus on political struggles that do not personally implicate them, like class issues." The "she" in that line is referencing this post, which is also good, and now I realize why I never finished writing any of these attempted posts: Too many good things to read in an effort to find the perfect one to link to.