Are the Walls Closing on Bernie Sanders?

I will be honest, and state for the record that I do not want Bernie Sanders, a Democrat only when convenient for himself, to mount a 2020 presidential campaign.  I'm not alone in this opinion.  Indeed, recently, the Barrie-Montpelier, Vermont Times Argus ran a main editorial begging Bernie Sanders NOT to run for the White House in 2020.  Here are some highlights:

Bernie Sanders should not run for president. In fact, we beg him not to. That is an unfavorable opinion, especially among most Vermonters and progressives who support the platform that has come to define him. But at this point, there are more things about another Sanders run at the White House that concern us than excite us.

We fear a Sanders run risks dividing the well-fractured Democratic Party, and could lead to another split in the 2020 presidential vote. There is too much at stake to take that gamble. If we are going to maintain a two-party system, the mandate needs to be a clear one. There is strength in numbers, and if anything has been shown in recent years, it is that unless tallies are overwhelming, there can always be questions or challenges raised over what “vote totals” really mean: popular vote vs. Electoral College results.

For us, this comes down to principle over ego. It is one thing to start a revolution, but at a certain point you need to know when to step out of the way and let others carry the water for you.

[T]here have been progressive candidates, many of whom have been running under Sanders’ “revolution” banner (and with his endorsement) who are spreading the tenets of Sanders’ decades-old agenda: Rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure; reversing climate change; creating worker co-ops; growing the trade-union movement; raising the minimum wage; pay equity for women workers; trade policies that benefit American workers; making college affordable for all; taking on Wall Street; health care as a human right; protecting the most vulnerable Americans; and tax reform.

As a platform, it is massive. As a candidate, Sanders is exhausting.

[H]is personality is abrasive. He is known to be difficult to work with. The 77-year-old can be bombastic and prickly. He can be dismissive and rude in his arrogance. You are either with Bernie Sanders or you are not.

That no-nonsense approach and his politics are endearing to many. But it is as extreme, on the other end of the spectrum in its policy elbow-throwing and idealism, as what we face today from the right in their standard bearer, Donald Trump.

Taken together — ego, electoral math, a tired message and a prickly media darling — Sanders is convincing himself that he’s the person who can win the White House in 2020. We are not convinced he should.

Ouch!!  Then there are the swirling allegations of sexual improprieties  surrounding Sanders' 2016 campaign that could alienate women voters.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at this other troubling aspect of a potential 2020 run.  Here are highlights:

As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) weighs a possible second bid for the White House, his political standing has grown shakier amidst an account of alleged sexual assault and accounts of alleged misconduct by staffers on his 2016 campaign.

Some former aides to that campaign had already balked at joining another run. And while outside groups are actively drafting him again—with meetings scheduled across the country this weekend—Sanders remains notably behind some of his Senate colleagues in the process of launching or preparing to launch a presidential bid. Even some of his former aides acknowledge the worsening political conditions.

“I think he still runs and I do think it’s going to be a lot harder,” a former staffer, who had decided not to return to the campaign prior to the surfacing of any of the allegations, told The Daily Beast.

For weeks, former staffers had been having private conversations about allegations of sexual harassment and unwanted advances on female staffers by Robert Becker, the head of Sanders’ Iowa operation. Those conversations primarily centered around ways to ensure that another bid didn’t bring the same problems as the previous one, including naming the 2016 bad actors and establishing a better structure for dealing with any such claims in a 2020 campaign.

On Thursday, a Politico story aired some of those claims about Becker, who has denied them, including allegations of forcible kissing, ogling prospective hires and a $30,000 settlement stemming from a federal discrimination complaint.

Masha Mendieta, a member of Sanders’ 2016 Latino outreach team . . . . said she was upset that the women making accusations hadn’t yet heard directly from the senator or his team. Last month, she had penned a Medium post expressing outrage that another 2016 campaign alum, Arturo Carmona, had been photographed at a Sanders Institute gathering in Vermont. Mendieta had accused Carmona, who ran for Congress in a special election, of sexual harassment, an allegation that he has denied.

Mendieta and another staffer also said that they had concerns about Rich Pelletier, Sanders’ former national field director, remaining in the senator’s political orbit. The New York Times reported that Pelletier allegedly failed to act swiftly after Giulianna Di Lauro, a Latino outreach strategist on the ‘16 campaign, complained to him of harassment by a campaign surrogate in Nevada.

Additionally, Jeff Weaver, the former campaign manager, said this week that he will not reprise his role should Sanders run again in 2020. The decision had been previously in the works and was not in response to the surfacing of harassment and assault allegations, sources said. But Weaver did acknowledged that a future prospective campaign needed more diversity.

“Was it too male? Yes. Was it too white? Yes,” he told The New York Times. “Would this be a priority to remedy on any future campaign? Definitely, and we share deeply in the urgency for all of us to make change.”

I support many of the policies Sanders talks about, but I simply do not believe he can win in 2020.  Thus, the question is whether Sanders will put the best interests of the policies he espouses first or will he put his ego ahead of them?  I hope it is not the latter.  The Democrats MUST win in 2020.

The New Yorker Endorses Hillary Clinton

As seems to be the case with major print media outlets in New York City, Donald Trump's home town, The New Yorker has endorsed Hillary Clinton in a lengthy editorial.  As noted before, those most familiar with Trump seemingly cannot stand the man and view him with revulsion.  A sample line from the endorsement: "The vileness of her opponent’s rhetoric and his record has been so widely aired that we can only hope she will be able to use her office and her impressive resolve to battle prejudice wherever it may be found."  Sadly, Trump now represents the true face of the Republican Party base and even if Trump loses, as I pray is the case, the sickness within the GOP will not be eliminated.  Here are endorsement highlights:

On November 8th, barring some astonishment, the people of the United States will, after two hundred and forty years, send a woman to the White House. The election of Hillary Clinton is an event that we will welcome for its immense historical importance, and greet with indescribable relief. It will be especially gratifying to have a woman as commander-in-chief after such a sickeningly sexist and racist campaign, one that exposed so starkly how far our society has to go. The vileness of her opponent’s rhetoric and his record has been so widely aired that we can only hope she will be able to use her office and her impressive resolve to battle prejudice wherever it may be found.

On every issue of consequence, including economic policy, the environment, and foreign affairs, Hillary Clinton is a distinctly capable candidate: experienced, serious, schooled, resilient.

If she is elected, she will have weathered a prolonged battle against a trash-talking, burn-it-to-the-ground demagogue. Unfortunately, the drama is not likely to end soon. The aftereffects of this campaign may befoul our civic life for some time to come.

If the prospect of a female President represents a departure in the history of American politics, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, the real-estate mogul and Republican nominee, does, too—a chilling one. He is manifestly unqualified and unfit for office.
 He favors conspiracy theory and fantasy, deriving his knowledge from the darker recesses of the Internet and “the shows.” He has never held office or otherwise served his country, never acceded to the authority of competing visions and democratic resolutions.

Worse still, he does not accept the authority of constitutional republicanism—its norms, its faiths and practices, its explicit rules and implicit understandings. That much is clear from his statements about targeting press freedoms, infringing on an independent judiciary, banning Muslim immigration, deporting undocumented immigrants without a fair hearing, reviving the practice of torture, and, in the third and final debate, his refusal to say that he will accept the outcome of the election. 

The prospect of such a President—erratic, empty, cruel, intolerant, and corrupt—represents a form of national emergency.

At a time of alarming and paralyzing partisanship, this is an issue that reasonable voices in both parties can agree upon. At last count, more than a hundred and sixty Republican leaders had declared their refusal to support Trump. Fifty national-security officials who served in Republican Administrations have done the same. The Cincinnati Enquirer, the Arizona Republic, the Dallas Morning News, and the Columbus Dispatch—all conservative newspapers, which have endorsed only Republicans for between seventy-six and a hundred and twenty-six years—have endorsed Clinton. USA Today, which has never endorsed a candidate, has declared Trump “unfit for the presidency” and has also endorsed Clinton.
 The combination of free-form opportunism, heroic self-regard, blithe contempt for expertise, and an airy sense of infallibility has contributed to Trump’s profound estrangement from the truth.  Hillary Clinton’s vision and temperament are the opposite of her opponent’s. She has been a pioneer throughout her life, and yet her career cannot be easily reduced to one transcendent myth: she has been an idealist and a liberal incrementalist, a glass-ceiling-smashing lawyer and a cautious establishmentarian, a wife and mother, a First Lady, a rough-and-tumble political operator, a senator, a Secretary of State. Her story is about walking through flames and emerging changed, warier and more determined. In her intelligence, in her gimlet-eyed recognition of both the limits and the possibilities of government, she’s a particular kind of inspirational figure, a pragmatist and a Democratic moderate. We wish that Clinton faced a worthy opponent: she deserves a less sullied, more substantive win. But her claim to our support goes far beyond the nihilism of the alternative. It is also notable that she has chosen as a running mate Tim Kaine, a highly capable politician with a record of genuine compassion; by contrast, the Republican Vice-Presidential choice, Mike Pence, has tried to position himself for the future on the national stage but has distinguished himself as one of the country’s most fiercely anti-gay politicians, declaring that marriage freedom would lead to “societal collapse.” The most important reason to vote for Clinton may be the matter of the Supreme Court. For two generations, conservative Justices have dominated the Court, and they have imposed their will on several critical areas of the law. Thanks to Citizens United and related cases, the law on campaign finance is in shambles, and wealthy donors now reign over the political process. In 2013, a five-to-four majority gutted the Voting Rights Act, perhaps the most important civil-rights law in American history, and Republican state legislators have taken advantage of this shameful moment in the Court’s history to limit the franchise of those who might vote against them—that is, minorities and Democrats. . . . . Clinton has a chance to lock in these gains, reverse some of the losses, and even augur a new, and very different, era on the Court.
 Despite the conspiratorial conjectures of Clinton’s opponents, her politics hide in plain sight. She is a committed progressive on many issues, including the rights of women and minorities; gun laws (she would expand background checks, close gun-show and Internet-sales loopholes, and repeal legislation that immunizes the gun industry from liability litigation); and, more recently, immigration (where she favors comprehensive reform, a pathway to citizenship, and an end to family detention). Clinton not only promises to be a vastly better President than her opponent; she has every chance of building on the successes and insights of a predecessor who will leave office with a remarkable record of progressive change and, in an often ugly time, as an exemplar of Presidential temper and dignity.

Sanders Endorses Hillary in LA Times Op-Ed

In a lengthy Los Angeles Times op-ed, Bernie Sanders made the case for his supporters to rally to and vote for Hillary Clinton.  While Sanders does not explicitly say this, staying home or voting for a Libertarian Candidate or Green Party candidate is a de facto vote for Donald Trump, a man whose policies, if elected, would be the antithesis of what Sanders has fought for - not to mention the Gospel message that Republicans claim to worship.  Hopefully, Sanders still disgruntled supporters will listen to Sanders and mobilize to make sure that Trump and the GOP go down to a crushing defeat in November.  Here are op-ed highlights:

Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee and I will vigorously support her.

Donald Trump would be a disaster and an embarrassment for our country if he were elected president. His campaign is not based on anything of substance — improving the economy, our education system, healthcare or the environment. It is based on bigotry. He is attempting to win this election by fomenting hatred against Mexicans and Muslims. He has crudely insulted women. And as a leader of the “birther movement,” he tried to undermine the legitimacy of our first African American president. That is not just my point of view. That’s the perspective of a number of conservative Republicans.

In these difficult times, we need a president who will bring our nation together, not someone who will divide us by race or religion, not someone who lacks an understanding of what our Constitution is about. 

On virtually every major issue facing this country and the needs of working families, Clinton’s positions are far superior to Trump’s. Our campaigns worked together to produce the most progressive platform in the history of American politics. Trump’s campaign wrote one of the most reactionary documents.

Clinton understands that Citizens United has undermined our democracy. She will nominate justices who are prepared to overturn that Supreme Court decision, which made it possible for billionaires to buy elections. Her court appointees also would protect a woman’s right to choose, workers’ rights, the rights of the LGBT community, the needs of minorities and immigrants and the government’s ability to protect the environment. 

Trump, on the other hand, has made it clear that his Supreme Court appointees would preserve the court’s right-wing majority.

Clinton understands that in a competitive global economy we need the best-educated workforce in the world. She and I worked together on a proposal that will revolutionize higher education in America. It will guarantee that the children of any family in this country with an annual income of $125,000 a year or less – 83% of our population – will be able to go to a public college or university tuition free. This proposal also substantially reduces student debt. 

Clinton understands that at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, it is absurd to provide huge tax breaks to the very rich. 

Trump, on the other hand, wants billionaire families like his to enjoy hundreds of billions of dollars in new tax breaks.

Clinton understands that climate change is real, is caused by human activity and is one of the great environmental crises facing our planet. She knows that we must transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and move aggressively to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. 

Trump, on the other hand, like most Republicans, rejects science and the conclusions of almost all major researchers in the field.

Clinton understands that this country must move toward universal healthcare. She wants to see that all Americans have the right to choose a public option in their healthcare exchange, that anyone 55 or older should be able to opt in to Medicare, and that we must greatly improve primary healthcare through a major expansion of community health centers. She also wants to lower the outrageously high cost of prescription drugs. 

And what is Donald Trump’s position on healthcare? He wants to abolish the Affordable Care Act, throw 20 million people off the health insurance they currently have and cut Medicaid for lower-income Americans.

I understand that many of my supporters are disappointed by the final results of the nominating process, but being despondent and inactive is not going to improve anything. Going forward and continuing the struggle is what matters. And, in that struggle, the most immediate task we face is to defeat Donald Trump.

An Open Letter to Bernie Sanders

Maybe I am just being peevish after a lousy night's sleep - my husband and I and the two dogs in a double bed at my sister's house after a little too much wine - but Bernie Sanders is quickly moving from the category of someone whose ideas I liked in many ways to a downright annoyance.  Despite the math that makes it clear that he has no way of winning the Democrat nomination absent something horrendous coming out about Hillary Clinton, Sanders continues to fight on for the nomination like a Don Quixote, seeking to damage Clinton.  The increasingly only beneficiary of his actions is whoever will be the GOP nominee - a nominee who will push an agenda that is the antithesis of everything Sanders claims to believe in and support.  A column in the Boston Globe makes a case that Sanders ought to listen to in my view (if readers disagree, please make your case in comments).  Here are excerpts: 

But here’s the thing – and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but maybe a little tough love is in order — you’re not going to win the Democratic nomination. This isn’t one of these “yeah, it’s a long shot, but maybe if I get lucky and everything goes my way” things. You’re not going to overcome Hillary Clinton’s lead in pledged delegates and you’re certainly not going to convince super delegates to vote for you over her. I mean, think about it: You’re trying to convince them to vote against the person who is almost certainly going to win in pledged delegates.

And even if you could win that way, would you really want to? In fact, if we’re really being honest here, the way your campaign has gone the past six weeks isn’t the way you want to win — or even the way you want to lose. Remember back in May 2015 when you said you didn’t want this campaign to be about Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders? Remember when you said you weren’t going to engage in character assassination and personal attacks?

Well, that hasn’t worked out so well over the past few weeks. I don’t want to rehash all the things you’ve said about Clinton that you once suggested you wouldn’t, but you are now running a real risk of undercutting the one person who you’ve said would be a better president on her worst day than all the Republicans currently running for the office. Even worse, you’re in real danger of sullying your otherwise inspiring campaign for president.

Look, I get it. You’re a politician; you’re a competitive guy. You want to win. Who wouldn’t? It’s like being a top-notch athlete and not wanting to take home a gold medal. No one aspires for silver, after all. And truth be told, when the odds were looking a bit longer for Hillary Clinton back in 2008, she didn’t exactly cover herself in glory during the last few months of the Democratic primary campaign.

So, mistakes have been made. Tough attacks delivered. Feelings hurt. It happens. But the question now — after the walloping you took in New York and the long odds you face in the upcoming primary states – is this: What’s your plan?

I suppose you could really go scorched earth on Clinton and fight this out to the convention. But why would you want to do that? Isn’t the real target on the Republican side? Hillary Clinton might not be your cup of tea, but surely on 100 out of 100 issues that you care about, she’d be better than Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.

So here’s my suggestion: Don’t end your campaign, re-frame it. Rather than talking about Hillary Clinton’s speech transcripts like you did yesterday in Pennsylvania, and rather than boasting about how you don’t have a Super PAC and your opponent does, focus on the issues that got you into this race in the first place. Keep talking about inequality, reforming campaign finance, and making the rich pay their fair share, but shift the focus away from Clinton.

Rather than raising money to run more ads that likely aren’t going to move the polling needle, start raising money for liberal Democrats in swing districts, Democrats who, with that little extra boost from your supporters, might be able to win in November. After all, if you want a political revolution, don’t you need to elect a few more like-minded Democrats to Congress? And with Trump as the likely GOP nominee, the chances of a Democratic wave in the House and the Senate are that much greater. Maybe focus on local races in places like Florida or Ohio or North Carolina, where Republican-dominated state legislatures are putting up restrictions on abortion rights, voting rights, and LGBT rights. You have the megaphone and the money to get your supporters involved in the nitty-gritty of local politics that Democrats have ignored for far too long. You want to beat the Democratic establishment? Become the Democratic establishment.

Rather than talking about a revolution that isn’t going to come this year, get your supporters focused on a more achievable set of goals. You’ve accomplished so much in the past year — don’t let your pursuit of the presidency get in the way of the kind of real change that could ensure your campaign is not a footnote but a first step toward a more progressive America.

White America’s Nervous Breakdown

Much of the insanity of the current presidential campaign contest on both sides of the political aisle stems from white American's facing up to the changing demographics sweeping the country and the horrific betrayal of the middle class by an economic system increasingly stacked in favor of the 1% that has sucked up all of the increased wealth over the last few decades.  On the Republican side, the candidates are cynically - as has become the GOP norm - using racism, nativism, and right wing Christian religious extremism to dupe angry Americans into supporting policies that will only make wealth disparities worse, not better.  On the Democrat side, the battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is about how to right the wrongs done to the middle class, rebuild the nation's infrastructure, and end the scandal of America's still inadequate health care system.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this internal debate and conflict.  Here are excerpts:

[F]ormer President Bill Clinton . . . . attributed much of the anger that’s present in the electorate to anxiety over a changing demographic profile of the country, but then said: We are going to share the future. The only question is: What will be the terms of the sharing?

This idea of negotiating the terms of sharing the future is an expansive one, on both ends of the ideological spectrum, but it also seems to me to be an internal debate white America is having with itself.

Much of the energy on both the left and the right this cycle is coming from white Americans who are rejecting the direction of America and its institutions. There is a profound disappointment. On one hand, it’s about fear of dislocation of supremacy, and the surrendering of power and the security it provides. On the other hand, it’s about disillusionment that the game is rigged and the turf is tilted. It is about defining who created this country’s bounty and who has most benefited from it.

White America is wrestling with itself, torn between two increasingly distant visions and philosophies . . . . 

America has a gauzy, romanticized version of its history that is largely fiction. According to that mythology, America rose to greatness by sheer ruggedness, ingenuity and hard work. It ignores or sidelines the tremendous human suffering of African slaves that fueled that financial growth, and the blood spilled and dubious treaties signed with Native Americans that fueled its geographic growth. It ignores that the prosperity of some Americans always hinged on the oppression of other Americans.

Much of America’s past is the story of white people benefiting from a system that white people designed and maintained, which increased their chances of success as it suppressed those same chances in other groups. Those systems persist to this day in some disturbing ways, but the current, vociferous naming and challenging of those systems, the placing of the lamp of truth near the seesaw of privilege and oppression, has provoked a profound sense of discomfort and even anger.

Indeed, the current urgency about inequality as an issue is really about how some white Americans are coming to live an experience that many minorities in this country have long lived — structural inequity has leapt the racial barrier — and that the legacy to which they fully assumed they were heirs is increasingly beyond their grasp.

Inequality has been a feature of the African-American condition in this country since the first black feet touched this ground.

Last month, the MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes tweeted: “This campaign is starting to feel more and more like a long, national nervous breakdown.” For white America, I believe this is true.

Hillary Clinton Needs to Step Up Her Game

As one whose biggest fear is a GOP win in the presidential election in November, I am dismayed at Hillary Clinton's campaign to date which has yet to energize many in the Democratic base, especially younger voters.  She is by far the best qualified candidate based on her experience, but she cannot seem to find an electrifying message that will turn out voters in November to block a GOP nightmare for the country.  A column in the New York Times looks at this issue and problem.  Here are excerpts:

Late Monday, as the unfinished vote count suggested the slimmest of victories for Hillary Clinton, she stepped to a microphone, flashed an Oscar-worthy smile of triumph and told supporters that she was “breathing a big sigh of relief.”

She wasn’t. She isn’t. And she definitely shouldn’t be.

But Iowa demonstrated, yet again, what a flawed and tarnished candidate she is. And on the Republican side, the caucuses augured the possibility of a retreat from the party’s craziness and the rise of an adversary, Marco Rubio, who could give her trouble in a general-election matchup.

She should have trounced Sanders. Yes, he communicates authenticity to an electorate ravenous for it and has given potent voice to Americans’ economic angst. But little in his Senate career suggests that he’d be able to turn that oratory into remedy.

President Obama clearly prefers Clinton. And in a poll of Democrats showing up for the Iowa caucuses, well over half said that they wanted someone who would continue Obama’s agenda — which is the precise pledge that Clinton has been making over the last few weeks — while only about one-third said that they preferred someone more liberal.

Even so, Clinton appears to have edged out Sanders by mere decimal points. How to explain it?

Perhaps with the sturdiest truism of politics: Elections are about the future. And so much about Clinton screams the past.

A rally of hers that I attended in Iowa last week actually began with a highlights reel of Clinton through time, including plenty of footage from the 1990s. . . . The retrospective underscored her extraordinary experience. But nothing in her subsequent speech looked forward as stirringly as those images looked backward.

It’s the language of drudgery and duty rather than inspiration, and she can sound as if she’s collecting on an i.o.u. and asking voters to complete her trajectory rather than begin one of their own.

Bill Clinton may well garner applause, but every time he stumps for her, it’s an implicit promise to revisit yesterday, not to chart tomorrow.

For months Democrats have been heartened by the absurdity with which Donald Trump infused the Republican primary and by the prospect of him or Ted Cruz as the party’s nominee. But his second-place showing could be his twilight, and Rubio’s strong third-place finish supports the scenario that he’s the one.

He poses a bigger threat to Clinton. He understands that she, like Jeb Bush, is an awkward fit for the national mood, and he’d try to take advantage of that. He leans hard on his youth. He talks about a new generation.

Clinton needs to persuade voters that as much as they’ve seen of her, she can still lead them to a place they’ve not yet seen. She hasn’t succeeded, and she slogs on from Iowa much as she did eight years ago: with more to prove than to savor.

Is Hillary Clinton Good for Progressives?

I've been a political activist for more years than I like to dwell on - first as a Republican and then, after the GOP went insane like a rabid dog with the rise of the Christofascists, by default as a Democrat.  The constant has been the goal of electing candidates even when that means moderating some of one's goals and desires.  It's a concept lost on the knuckle dragging, Bible thumping GOP base as recently demonstrated by the Virginia GOP's failed 2013 slate.  It is also lost at times among those in the liberal wing of the Democrats.  You can love a candidate to death, but if you cannot get them elected, then you have wasted time, tons of money, and given the opposition a chance to enact horrific policies.  Currently, on the Democratic side of the aisle you have the vociferous supporters of Elizabeth Warren who pan Hillary Clinton.  They say Hillary is "untrustworthy" etc.  Perhaps, however, that is a good thing as argued by a piece in Salon.  Here are column highlights:

[L]ast week, the New York Times and CBS published a new poll on how the public views former secretary of state and current presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC). There were two big takeaways for the 2016 frontrunner, both of which could be reasonably seen by left-wing activists as good omens for the months and maybe years to come.

The poll’s most striking discovery pertained to how voters felt about Clinton’s handling of her email while at Foggy Bottom, . . . . during the weeks following the press’s wall-to-wall coverage of “emailgate,” Clinton’s favorability actually went up. And it wasn’t just a little statistical blip; it was an increase of nine full points.

The poll’s second notable finding, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly so much of a boon to Clinton supporters. According to CBS and the Times, fewer than half of respondents described her as “honest and trustworthy”; and that number was only near the 50 percent mark because around 80 percent of Democrats answered in the affirmative. This issue of HRC’s trustworthiness has been the thin reed on which many of the loudest promoters of the emailgate pseudo-scandal have hung their arguments. But as Ronald Brownstein writes in National Journal, a Clinton has already won the White House before while being seen as less than entirely untrustworthy.

However, just because American doubts about her honesty are unlikely to keep HRC out of the White House, that doesn’t mean that her image on this score is irrelevant. What it means instead is that Clinton’s low margin for error on trust will manifest in harder to perceive ways during her campaign and hypothetical presidency. For example, look at President Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s argument over fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It’s the kind of debate Obama is having with those on his left — a debate over progressive bona fides — that a President Clinton probably will not.

Yet what matters for our purposes isn’t the TPP so much as the way Warren and Obama, arguably liberal America’s two favorite politicians, have been fighting about it through the media.

The biggest reason why Obama has been able to adopt this strategy can probably be found in a Gallup poll released earlier this month. On that question of trustworthiness, the president fares well, especially by the standards of our polarized era: 53 percent of respondents say “honest and trustworthy” applies to Obama, while just 45 percent disagree. That’s not a Grand Canyon’s worth of distance apart from HRC’s 48 percent, of course. But it is enough to make the White House feel relatively confident that liberals are willing to trust the president — and to make Warren skip over Obama and raise concerns about what the next (possibly Republican) president might do with fast-track’s powers.  

On the trail (as well as in the White House, if she wins) Clinton will be much more constricted. Yes, she’s very popular with self-identified liberals; and, yes, like Obama’s, much of her negative numbers on trustworthiness are the product of overwhelmingly disdain from conservatives. But while Democrats may on the whole approve of HRC, they don’t necessarily trust her, at least not yet. 

[I]f Brownstein is right, and HRC wins despite a majority of voters not exactly trusting her completely, it could be something of a win-win for liberal activists. Not only would they get a non-Republican president, but they’d get one with a stronger desire than the current incumbent to prove she’s one of them.