Hillary 3.0

Hillary Clinton is not running for president. But she may very well be sauntering for president.

Still the same politician who told Goldman Sachs bankers during a paid speech that she has "a public position and a private position," she denies publicly that she is running for the highest office in the land while at the same time vowing to "stay relevant" and letting it be known that sure, she still wants to be president. And if we are to believe Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, Hillary is pretty bemused that people literally take her at her "I'm not running" word.

The plethora of Democrats announcing their own candidacies well over a year before the first primaries are to be held was, I suspect, supposed to dilute the field enough to make Bernie Sanders irrelevant, especially when given that such corporate contenders as Kamala Harris and Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand have eagerly adopted Medicare For All and other liberal policy proposals which were deemed too radical when Sanders first challenged Clinton with them for the 2016 nomination. 

Perhaps the private, as opposed to the public, plan was for these candidates to siphon off enough votes from Sanders to necessitate a brokered convention in 2020. Since the super-delegates are still allowed their weighted votes should the first ballot fail to nominate anyone, it is entirely feasible that Hillary Clinton could be nominated by undemocratic acclaim, without ever having had to physically hit the trail for a third time. After all, everybody already knows who she is, despite that pesky public-private positioning. And sauntering rather than running also protects her from any more pesky scrutiny.

Of course, the corporate media would love a Clinton-Trump do-over. Think of the ratings and the ad revenue and the guarantee of No Medicare For All Not Ever. And the Democratic Party elders would do just about anything to destroy Bernie Sanders, even if it means a second term for Trump. They are perfectly content to raise money off their roles as #Resistance Fighters. Nothing sells like perpetual umbrage in high places.

So employing the old standard Clintonoid parsing ploy, Hillary no doubt feels perfectly sincere when she says she's not running. She is not running right now, because for one thing, and for some reason known only to her own private self, she is said to be waiting for the Mueller report to be released before deciding. She may never run at all in the traditional sense. Because she received those storied three million more actual votes than Trump did in 2016, she is already The Elect. She's a special case. She always has been.

The common, but already failing, conventional media wisdom had been that Bernie fans would enthusiastically embrace one of the current crop of poseurs, because they're younger, more physically appealing and "diverse" than he is. But since he raised record-breaking amounts in small donations on the first official day of his campaign, the media has quickly advanced to full Bernie destruction mode. The most common trope, despite the fact that it has no basis in fact, is that Sanders doesn't appeal to black voters. One recent example of this genre appears in The Guardian, where Theodore R Johnson warns readers that Bernie's outreach to blacks, even if he reaches out to them all day and every day, "will not be enough."

The alleged reason?

These tips-of-the-hat to black Americans’ disparate experience are unlikely to move the electorate into his coalition in any significant way for a few reasons. First, history has fostered a political pragmatism within the black electorate that tends to prefer moderate Democratic candidates who have a track record of deep and persistent engagement. Because of the centrality of the civil rights question, black voters most often support presidential candidates they trust with protecting the gains made to date. This trust is earned over time or through a shared lived experience. This is why establishment candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and why black candidates like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, have the inside track with this bloc. Sanders has yet to show he can break through.

Johnson doesn't acknowledge the polls that show Bernie is leading in every identity parameter except, by a very slim margin, race. As Vox reports,

An analysis of recent polls from November of 2018 to March 2019 shows Sanders is more popular with people of color than white people, and women like Sanders as much as men do, if not more. He leads every other possible 2020 contender with Latino voters and lags behind only Joe Biden — who hasn’t announced a bid yet — with African-American voters. Sanders’ polling numbers with black voters are double that of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), according to a March Morning Consult poll.

He only lags, and not by much, and mainly among older, more conservative black voters. 

At the end of the Guardian piece, readers are informed that author Theodore R Johnson is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center For Justice. Yeah, civil rights credibility! What we aren't told is that he is a retired U.S. Navy official and also a recent fellow at New America, a neoliberal pro-war think tank led by former Clinton State Department adviser Anne-Marie Slaughter and staffed with alumnae of the Clinton and Obama administrations. His journalistic side-career writing for various corporate media outlets included one typical February 2018 piece for Slate.

Since it appeared a year before Bernie-Bashing 2.0 officially got underway, Johnson instead used his propaganda skills to insinuate that black voters were too doped up on Russian "blini and vodka" to propel Hillary to victory in 2016. Russia's alleged spellbinding of the American black electorate has been a common propaganda trope used by Clintonoid forces to try and explain why black voters didn't come out for her in 2016. It's really quite the racial scapegoat, not to mention stereotype, because it denies black people their own agency and assumes that they're a monolithic bloc who lack critical thinking skills.

As a matter of "fact," Johnson claimed, in a throwback to J. Edgar Hoover, Russia has been messing with and hypnotizing black people's heads since the 1960s Civil Rights era:

Russia used the U.S. history of racial oppression and its persistent challenges with systemic racism to manipulate (or at least attempt to manipulate) Americans’ electoral choices. And this wasn’t a simple add-on tactic to a larger influence operation. Rather, it’s in keeping with several decades of Russian efforts to use the United States’ treatment of its black citizens as a counterpoint to the American narrative of freedom and equality. The major difference today is that social media marketing allows Russia to do with efficiency and scale what it could never do with Cold War–era print and radio propaganda.

In other words, Johnson is a paid propagandist for both the corporate Democratic Party and its affiliates in the military-industrial complex. But I think you had that all figured out the minute you finished slogging through his sleazy Guardian piece.  

Norman Solomon wrote a great article about all the anti-Bernie propaganda that's been churning out there in an already-furious boil. He thinks that it's not the Party itself we have to worry about so much as it is the Party-aligned media. I think that it's both, and that we won't see much direct official Party sleaze in action until the first primaries. Then the DNC jaws will publicly clamp down in earnest if Bernie wins and makes it all the way to the convention.

Meanwhile, Hillary saunters.