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writing for godot

Cornel West and Jill Stein's Campaign Against Clinton and Trump

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Written by Rob Hager   
Wednesday, 20 July 2016 14:15
Some of the smarter Democrats who can read polls are getting worried. With Hillary Clinton as their nominee, they will “have to be prepared for a close election,” as expressed by Senator Bob Casey. In his keystone blue state of Pennsylvania, which gave its hefty electoral vote to Democrats in the last six elections, Donald Trump is polling ahead of Clinton.

Superdelegates and other Democrats might have taken similar polls into consideration during the primary/caucus season during which Sanders, but not Clinton, was consistently finishing well ahead of Trump from the beginning. If they want to stop being “freaked out,” as another Democrat put it, they only need to change their candidate. The original purpose of superdelegates was to correct for the folly of nominating a loser, when a popular winner is available. With Servergate swinging open, and the Republican base calling to “lock 'er up” as their loudest demand, it is unlikely to get any better for Clinton.

The clock is ticking for the Democrats. Sanders could still be nominated, even though he is planning to campaign for Clinton, for unpersuasive reasons. What Democrats need to do to win used to be called a “draft.”

If they would like to avoid the risk of electing Trump, instead of continuing their death march over the Clinton cliff, these party leaders can still organize their fellow Superdelegates to nominate their newest party-loyalist The Superdelegates only need to abstain from the first vote. This would release all of Clinton's pledged delegates to cast a second ballot vote for Sanders.

To make it easier for the professional Democrats to choose victory over Clinton, Cornel West and Jill Stein should announce that they are running a joint campaign for President and Vice President, on the same themes that Sanders abandoned in favor of pursuing them through a professional activist issue organization. The Vice Presidency is a demeaning job having no purpose. Between two honest mutually respectful people who are trying to serve the public and not themselves, a deal could be made to equally share the office of presidency within the terms of the Constitution. See Art 25(3). All significant presidential decisions would be made jointly, and resolved by the cabinet in case of deadlock. The time may also have come to implement the often suggested idea of choosing a cabinet as part of the election process, so the public would know who the tiebreakers are too.

This progressive ticket should start its campaign by jointly asking Sanders to share his famous mailing list with them so that they can jumpstart their campaign. West and Stein should also announce their intention to not run a third party effort and instead support Sanders, if the superdelegates do their job next week, instead of selling out to Clinton.

West and Stein; Stein and West. Both are qualified by their personal accomplishments, West as an academic, writer, and the nation's foremost public intellectual. Stein is a community activist and medical doctor who has studied the issues. Both thus share Donald Trump's only outstanding quality to be President, that he is an outsider to politics with no experience in governing the corrupt system at all. West, like Trump, has also spent a lot of time in front of the camera with Tavis Smiley and on other shows. But this progressive team has none of Trump's bad qualities, like “lying” and an “absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and money.” West and Stein have forgotten more than Trump ever knew about government, other than exactly how to pay off an influence peddler. They could beat Trump.

In 2016 Sanders proved it was possible to run a campaign by delivering over and over the same speech he has been giving for forty years and by establishing his apparent authenticity in backing a clearly progressive agenda. West and Stein are both more authentic than Sanders proved to be and more progressive on such issues that count as civil rights and imperialism. This is easily said of West, who has had a productive academic and a long public life. West is as authentic as any public figure. He was painfully honest about the great deceiver, Obama, whom he accurately and early called a “puppet of corporate plutocrats,” while absorbing personal attacks from Obama surrogates for telling the truth. He then without hesitation also refused to follow Sanders into the safety of embracing the corrupt Clinton-Obama party, walking away from the prestigious Platform Committee seat his endorsement and campaign for Sanders had earned him.

West's endorsement of Stein should be good enough, though from what she has demonstrated over a far shorter time in national life, one would anticipate her debate with Clinton and Trump as much as West's.

In the last couple generations of national decline, Americans have tried a B-movie actor and a silver spoon CIA director, a crooked sexual predator and a pious dancing idiot, and finally a brilliant fraud. None of this has worked as the rich got richer, the country turned ever more plutocratic, and its military fought incessant imperial wars of value only to plutocrats.

The Sanders campaign suggests that people might, for a change, be looking for good leadership in 2016. But they have instead been offered a choice between a sociopath with the attention span of a Kindergartner and the representative of a corrupt political machine who a majority believe should be indicted, West and Stein appear to be, most fundamentally, good people. From all appearances, as a religious scholar West has crafted a life based on the best of Christian values. He is the only public person for whom everyone is a brother or sister. West speaks truth without making controversy personal. If Americans want good leadership why not try a couple known good people, instead of continue electing one embarrassment after the other until Obama, who in many ways appeared the best, but performed the worst as Wall Street's ultimate confidence man.

It is a fateful coincidence that West and Stein together also happen to undermine Clinton's only windowdressing for her own life of service to plutocracy. The Obama/Clinton's platform is identity politics – diversity crumbs from the table of plutocracy. Under Obama "black folk don't know what happened." Though they lost ground on all economic indicators, according to Tavis Smiley, "they have been too deferential to this president." Since what is under decision in 2016 is the perpetuation of Obama's fraudulent identity politics in a new identity, no one could more fearlessly and truthfully present this issue than Cornel West.

Though the Green Party, unlike the Democratic Party, is not an identity politics organization, it is fortuitously led at this time by a woman, which challenges perhaps Clinton's most authentic qualification. Obama showed that intelligence in the absence of honesty is no qualification at all, little better than the stupidity that preceded him. Clinton may have more experience than Stein, but it is all bad experience, accomplishing no more than punching her own card, and nothing for the country. She is considered even less honest than Trump. West challenges her appeal to people of color. He campaigned to win over black voters to Sanders but had the liability of backing a candidate who was as strategically incompetent on civil rights as on anything else, even in the midst of the current civil rights crisis.

Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report has performed a useful service by naming as identity politicians the corrupt “entrenched black leadership that serves only itself” and plutocrats, able to deliver different black constituencies to the Clintons. The purpose of Dixon's article was to show how Bernie Sanders failed to penetrate this problem so badly that he did not even “knock on the door” to where the solution was. Working with Stein, West should have far greater strategic flexibility to make demands and offer policies that will directly appeal to black constituencies' need for more than the symbolism offered by Obama and Clinton.

Between the two progressives, support for Clinton's identity politics could waver as they mount a more effective progressive attack against her plutocratic supporters than Sanders did. Finally, unlike Sanders they can clearly distinguish themselves from the corrupt Democratic Party by joining their voices to those of Republicans who are calling to “lock her up” for the crimes of Servergate.

Rob Hager has worked as an international consultant on anti-corruption policy. He is currently writing a three-part book assessing proposals for ending the political influence of special interest money. The current eLibrary draft of the first part, Hillary Clinton's Dark Money Disclosure “Pillar,” is available online.
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