Don't Let the Media Fool You, the Difference Between Hillary and Bernie is Huge!

Right now, there is an important battle taking place that will help define the course of liberalism and the Democratic Party for a very long time. If you haven’t really noticed, that’s the way the mainstream media would like to keep it. Here's why.

Watching the most recent Democratic debates, I have found it very tiring to see Hillary Clinton laboriously struggle to work a description of herself as a "progressive“ into as many answers as possible. It seems like a contrived effort to repeat some focus-group tested talking point that could help her pivot toward whatever is working for her opponent, which has seemed to be the defining aspect of her reaction whenever struggling in a campaign.

In 2008, Clinton seemed like a sure thing. President Obama, then a 45 year-old first-term Senator, wasn’t even on the radar except as a potential future presidential candidate. Facing criticism from the right that she wasn’t Commander-in-Chief material, while Obama was being framed by the right as a left-wing Saul Alinsky radical, Clinton quickly moved to sell herself as the ultimate moderate. Adopting a particularly-hawkish worldview, Clinton also reminded voters that she had been a "Goldwater Girl,“ a name given to female volunteers supporting the GOP’s 1964 Presidential candidate.

This was a good move politically and an easy sell, because–despite what the right wing might tell you–both she and former President Bill Clinton have a long political history as moderate, centrist Democrats. In 1992, the couple bragged that they weren’t Michael Dukakis or Jesse Jackson and spoke of a "third-way" in triangulating moderates on both sides with independents to form a majority coalition. Aided by Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy, it worked and Bill Clinton went from a long-shot nominee for the party’s nomination to the becoming the 42nd President of the United States with only 43 percent of the popular vote.

Bill Clinton also enjoyed one of the most successful presidencies of the modern era. Throughout his eight years as President, America was prosperous and safe–far and away the two largest concerns of American voters. Our foreign policy was based on diplomacy and sanctions that were backed up by a threat of military force which was judiciously dispensed as a last resort only when necessary. Fueled by historic growth in the technology sector, the economy grew and unemployment fell (the overvaluation of Silicon Valley stocks and the resulting dot.com bubble wasn’t a result of Clinton’s policies; the way the housing bubble burst resulted from the Fed deliberately depressing interest rates).

The idea that the only difference between Sanders and Clinton is her experience and pragmatism seems ridiculous. No one who is familiar with the political history of the Democratic Party can argue that there does not exist a left-wing, progressively-liberal element, or that it has largely been dissatisfied with the party establishment over the last 30 years, as it has continued to cozy up to corporate special interests, while distancing itself all but rhetorically from the common working man with whom its roots are associated.

In 2004 and 2008, Congressman Dennis Kucinich ran for the Democratic nomination, while representing this contingent. It was somewhat uncomfortable having Kucinich on the stage in 2008, asking both Obama and Clinton why, if they were so interested in universal health care, had they been nowhere to be found when the Congressman was trying to pass his "Medicare for All" bill–the same sort of system Sanders is today promoting. It was also uncomfortable for Clinton to have Kucinich, the only true anti-war candidate in the race, calling her out on her Iraq War vote the way Sanders does today.

NBC seemed to find it uncomfortable as well. At the time, the company was owned by General Electric, one of the nation’s most prosperous defense contractors. They barred Kucinich from the MSNBC debate in Las Vegas, despite him having met the polling threshold the network had previously announced. The DNC did not come to his rescue. Frozen out by the mainstream media and marginalized by his own party, Kucinich’s grassroots campaign floundered and he was soon out of the race.

In 2000, Ralph Nader had won support from much of the progressive Democratic wing in his independent run. Nader, who had a much more liberal and progressive agenda than moderate Democratic nominee Al Gore, was later blamed by the Democratic establishment (which had tried to dissuade his supporters by arguing that a vote for Nader was a vote for George W. Bush) for costing Gore the election. They placed little blame on Gore for his bland, centrist campaign that targeted independents rather than energizing the party’s base, resulting in a failure to carry even his own state and a widespread defection of Democrats, including the quarter of a million in Florida who voted for George W. Bush (as opposed to less than 100,000 who voted for Nader).

This narrative is emblematic of the way the Democratic establishment and candidates like Clinton have viewed this contingent of its party, who they always seem to make very little effort to appease other than through campaign rhetoric. Democrats, fixated on the ever elusive middle-of-the-road voter, seem to thumb their nose to the grassroots of the party, as if to say: Take who we give you. What choice do you have? Are you going to vote for the Republican?

This dynamic isn’t unique to Democrats. Over the same time period that they were moving away from the party’s core values, a neo-conservative movement was causing a huge rift in the Republican Party. Fiscal conservatives in the mold of William F. Buckley were having a hard time with Republicans who thought nothing of running huge deficits or cutting taxes without balancing the cuts with reductions in spending, while spending blindly on nation-building and other forms of costly military adventurism. This frustration expressed itself in the surprising success of another septuagenarian, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who played the Dennis Kucinich role in that party’s 2008 and 2012 primaries–to the similar disdain of the Republican establishment.

It’s long been said that Republicans fear their base, while Democrats loathe theirs, and the efforts of the Republican Party to appease its far-right Tea Party element, while Democrats have showed no corresponding efforts on their side might suggest there is truth to that statement. Only now it’s young Democrats and frustrated long-ignored veteran progressives who are saying they have had enough–and laughing (or fuming) at Clinton’s comments about her own ideology and record.

It’s possible that Clinton doesn’t really understand this dynamic and really thinks that she’s a "progressive with a plan," as she likes to repeat time and again. A lot of people, especially public figures who are surrounded by loyal subjects and fawning admirers, become immune over time to the perception that exists outside of their bubble. In politics especially, it seems easy for those inside the machine to convince themselves that to effect change, you need to play the game, get inside the institutions and inch things along a little at a time. That’s a common strategy and not one without merit. There have certainly been a lot of impactful activists on both the left and the right, who’ve made poor legislators and leaders simply because they were ready and willing to die on every hill.

Clinton often paints Sanders with this brush, suggesting, in a very nuanced way, that his ideas might sound good but would never work and aren’t even worth trying. This plays to the idea that there’s not really a difference between the two candidates ideologically, only in Clinton’s superior experience and understanding of political realities. I would argue, however, that part of Sanders’ appeal, especially to young voters, is that people are tired of being told that good ideas simply cannot work because those asking to be in charge are incapable of breaking the gridlock. If this primary cycle has shown us anything, it’s that on both sides of the aisle, voters are receptive to the idea that our challenges have become so great that we can no longer afford the elites telling us to tame our expectations while they inch things along.

For all the talk of her experience, it is Sanders who has spent 33 years as a mayor, Congressman and U.S. Senator. He has served on and chaired a number of key committees and has been a central figure in holding the Democratic establishment accountable to the progressive wing during the few times it’s been accomplished. Meanwhile, Clinton has eight years in the Senate, where she had few meaningful accomplishments, plus four years as Secretary of State, a term in which she’s had, at best, mixed reviews.

Sanders also has a lifelong record as an activist who has been on the frontlines of progressively-liberal issues. While Clinton was campaigning for Goldwater, who voted against the Civil Rights Act, Sanders was marching with Martin Luther King Jr. and getting arrested during a sit-in protesting segregated housing at the University of Chicago. It’s worth noting that Goldwater wasn’t merely a Republican, but the GOP candidate who repulsed progressives more than perhaps any other in history, including Nixon in 1974 and George W. Bush in 2004. For context, King himself said, "We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign." Liberal Senator J. William Fulbright said, "Goldwater Republicanism is the closest thing in American politics to an equivalent of Russian Stalinism." California Gov. Pat Brown said that Goldwater’s acceptance speech "had the stench of fascism" and that "All we needed to hear was 'Heil Hitler.'"

Needless to say, Sanders was an ardent detractor of Goldwater. However, this is far from being the only matter of distinction between he and Clinton. Sanders has always been an steadfast supporter of workers’ rights, including unions and the ability to collectively bargain with employers. For more than a decade, Sanders has been railing against Walmart and the idea that the largest and most profitable corporation in the world was being subsidized by taxpayers in the form of social services like Medicaid and food stamps for its poorly paid employees, while 5 of the top 10 richest people in a nation of 400 million had received their wealth as heirs to the company’s founder.

Clinton on the other hand, spent six years on Walmart’s Board of Directors, while her husband was the sitting Governor of Arkansas. During that time, the board of the notoriously anti-union company had plenty of conversation about keeping unions out of their company, led by fellow board member John "Labor unions are nothing but blood-sucking parasites" Tate, who was personally selected by founder Sam Walton to be his anti-union guy. Records show that Clinton did not take up the union cause and remained largely silent when the issue was raised. I will note that the same records also show that she was a strong voice for women in the workplace, pushing the company to look at its lack of females in management and executive positions, though to no statistical effect. She also pushed the company on reducing its environmental footprint.

I think this too is instructive. It shows Clinton as the moderate liberal, willing to take a nice paycheck from a company like Walmart (a company that she and Bill held $100,000 in stock in at the time) for sitting on its board of directors, and rationalizing the fact that she was able to be a voice for women in the company who had until that time been unrepresented (Clinton ended up on the board because Walton’s wife had pressured him to finally put a woman on it). Most moderate Democrats and Independents certainly wouldn’t see a problem with this.


When Clinton was a freshman at Wellesley College in 1968, she became a member of the school’s Young Republicans chapter. In her personal narrative, she describes 1968 and the assassination of Martin Luther King, who she’d met briefly through a youth pastor at her Methodist Church as a teenager, as an ideological turning point. This is supported by accounts of those close to her who described her as a moderating force on a college campus during the onset of a sort of cultural revolution. She opposed the Vietnam war, and soon she was volunteering for Senator Eugene McCarthy, the liberal anti-war icon who sought the Democratic nomination in 1968 (losing to Hubert Humphrey).

Clinton was part of a new wave of young white-collar Democrats who, turned off by the racist elements of the anti-civil rights crowd and opposition to the war, helped buoy the party against the loss of southern Democrats who opposed integration. That era signaled the beginning of a shift away from the blue collar union workers that had been the party’s bread and butter and toward neo-liberalism–and probably best explains the differences between Sanders and Clinton, who, let me remind you are only separated by six years in age and, as such, were contemporaries during that time.

Neo-liberalism really began taking hold during the Carter administration. Despite his progressive environmental and foreign policy records, President Carter’s efforts to deregulate airlines, commercial transportation and railroads signaled a shift away from their place as public/corporate infrastructure and toward becoming more solely the domain of private enterprise, while cutting the legs out from under the airline, trucking and railroad unions. This was the start of an intellectual premise that the way to cope with an increasingly competitive global economy was to focus on making things cheaper and more profitable, even though it would come at the expense of the high-paying labor jobs that had created and supported an American middle class for almost half a century. This is also the essential argument between the ideologies of Clinton and Sanders.

As President, Bill Clinton continued the neo-liberal approach. NAFTA, similar trade deals and the deregulation of investment banking pushed forward the idea that we could make things cheaper and more profitable, while not addressing the loss of living-wage jobs with anything more than rhetoric about retooling our labor force and capturing the markets by being on the cutting edge of clean, sustainable technology-based industries by investing heavily in education. Imagining that we could do that while following a bipartisan belief (if not rhetorical agreement) that the trickle-down effect of low taxes, either worked or was politically impossible to avoid, proved pie in the sky.

The economic ideology didn’t really change under Bush (especially with regard to trade) except that he doubled down on spending and turned a surplus into an enormous deficit, adding trillions to the debt. Thus began the fomenting of his party’s revolt against the neo-conservative movement that began with Reagan and intensified under both Bushes. In 2008, it looked like Clinton would be the default candidate of the neo-liberals, who had long since become the party establishment, until they saw a better opportunity with a moderate, corporate-friendly fresh face from the Chicago political machine.

When Hillary Clinton suggested during a recent debate that according to Sanders’ definition, even Obama wouldn’t be a progressive, it seemed like she really didn’t get the distinction. Obama became President at the height of the financial crisis. Aided by bipartisan deregulation, the industry had just brought the world economy to the brink of collapse. If ever there had been a chance to rein in Wall Street and wrangle the Democratic Party away from its long-favored Sugar Daddy and back toward the working class, President Obama had it. But that’s not who Obama is and progressives–like Sanders–weren’t surprised when he left Wall Street and the banks off the hook with little more than weak tea in the way of reforms. As Clinton noted, President Obama has taken more money from Wall Street than any candidate ... ever.

Why? One can only guess, but there’s good evidence that Democrats like Clinton, Obama and the vast majority of those in Congress simply believe that neo-liberalism is not only the most electable path for their party but the best path for America. They helped engineer a movement away from manufacturing, transportation, unions, public works projects to address our crumbling infrastructure and toward cheap goods from abroad. Meanwhile, more of the nation’s GDP became concentrated in the relatively small financial services sector and non-white collar workers were relegated largely to a non-unionized, low-paying service sector.

Consider this: total compensation in the financial sector (including profits, wages, salary and bonuses) hit an all-time high in 2013 at around 9 percent of GDP. How does this happen? For starters, the cost of matching investors with savings to borrowers who need money, which is called intermediation, has nearly doubled in the past three decades, while enjoying the same information technology advancements that has almost universally drastically decreased the cost of doing business in every industry. Why is Wall Street unique in this inefficiency? Because it's designed to be that way. By claiming an exorbitant amount of the economic growth it facilitates, the industry diverts much of the wealth from real growth to itself. The rules are set up in its favor, and the politicians it keeps in power are not eager to bite the hand that feeds them.

That’s where Clinton’s Wall Street ties become an issue. Like Obama in 2008, she is the preferred neo-liberal candidate of Wall Street. Despite all of her tough talks on how she gave them an earful during speeches for which she was routinely paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour for (she won’t release the transcripts that were taken in order to prove that she chastised her audience), the fact is, she cashed their checks–again something it is impossible to imagine Bernie Sanders doing.


Profound wealth has a way of tempering radical ideas on the way things should be, especially when you’re benefiting so much from the status quo. Millionaires like Clinton and Obama are aided in this area by a corporate media that displays a similar dynamic. The entrenched conflicts of interest that exist among the global conglomerates who own not only the news networks but many other interests that benefit from the status quo have created a stunningly-similar class of Powerball rich "journalists" who often shape the debate in a way that is extremely favorable for the status quo.

Consider the seven-year $105 million deal ABC gave former Clinton staffer George George Stephanopoulos–an unheard of amount for a bottom-tier host, that is similar to the compensation of anchors like Brian Williams or Today Show host Matt Lauer, both of whom had a much better ratings history. Shortly after signing the deal, Stephanopoulos was found to have given generously to the controversial Clinton Foundation, a fact he did not disclose while interviewing Peter Schweizer, the author of the book Clinton Cash, which alleges that donations to the foundation influenced some of Hillary’s actions while Secretary of State. Stephanopoulos said it was enough that the foundation’s donations are public record, as though audiences are supposed to track down every donation a so-called journalist makes each time they view their work.

Of course, Stephanopoulos shouldn’t be expected to know this, because despite having been put into the top 1 percent of American income earners through his compensation for work in news media, he’s not a journalist. In fact, he wasn’t even able to handle White House press briefings and was replaced before even being named Press Secretary after bumbling several briefings during the first six months Bill was in office. The foundation misstep wasn’t Stephanopoulos’ first Clinton scandal either. Two years after helping Bill Clinton get elected to his first term, Stephanopoulos was discovered to have been given a sweetheart loan of nearly a million dollars for a mixed-use investment property from a banker that had ties to the Clintons.

Yet despite Stephanopoulos’ close ties to the Clinton family, ABC still allows him to interview Hillary and it wasn’t until the foundation scandal that he had to drop out as a moderator of ABC’s Republican debate, an event in which he caused an uproar among Republicans in 2008 by asking front-runner Mitt Romney an obscure question about contraception that seemed designed to be planted in an effort to catch what could have been a soundbite for a Hillary Clinton commercial were she to have won the Democratic nomination. Watch any of the interviews for Hillary’s many appearances on This Week and ask yourself who seems to be directing the conversation, the guest or the host, or whether the Clintons get the same grilling as Sanders or Republican guests.