I’d started working on Delfino’s article last night and I was going to hit him even harder but this one does such a good job (and steals so much of my own thunder), I’ll just tip my hat to you. Well done, sir.
A few additional items:
— You write that Delfino “appears to represent only that tiny minority (8%) of Democrats who oppose Bernie Sanders.” The sheer density of Delfino’s collage of calumnies, it most be conceded, makes it a rather creepy read. It’s not a run-of-the-mill article, it’s an epic hate-fest that leaves one with the impression that this is someone absolutely stewing in obsessive hatred — a guy with a serious screw loose. However else one reads Delfino, it’s definitely fair to categorize him as someone who, in pollster lingo, has a “strongly unfavorable” view of Sanders. This puts him in a smaller group than 8%; the Harvard/Harris survey, which polls on this every month, tells us only 3% of Democrats have a “strongly unfavorable” view of Sanders. Delfino’s is basically a margin-of-error view.
— Delfino fills his article with a very large number of links. By volume, they appear superficially impressive but that seems to be the only point of them; upon inspection, they mostly fall apart. Sometimes, they’re of only marginal relevance. Frequently, they just track back to Clintonites in the press during the 2016 contests offering earlier versions of the same slanders Delfino is repeating in the present.
— One of the examples of the latter is an item you don’t touch, Delfino’s libelous claim that Sanders
“declared Clinton unqualified for the presidency due to her support for NAFTA, her Wall Street fundraising, and her Iraq War vote. Once again, when put in a sticky position he backtracked, only to later double down and triple down.”
What actually happened was that the Clinton campaign launched an effort to portray Sanders as unqualified to be president and Sanders merely reacted to that by turning the attack back on itself. “They’re going to question my qualifications, well I’m going to question theirs." The Clintonites in the campaign and the corporate press then did their usual pearl-clutching routine and the public was inundated with 7 days of stories about how Sanders has “gone negative” and said Clinton was “ not qualified,” with that Clinton strategy that started the whole thing consigned to a Memory Hole. Robin Andersen reconstructed the timeline of the whole sorry affair at the time. What Delfino characterizes as Sanders doubling down and tripling down was merely Sanders explaining, on different occasions, what actually happened. Clintonites in the press, like the CNN reporter at Delfino’s first link, said Clinton herself had never said Sanders wasn’t qualified to be president. Apparently, her own campaign officials, who said they were going to “disqualify” Sanders, can’t be said to speak for her. But we all know Clinton is never responsible for anything, right?
(It’s particularly hilarious to see a devout Clintonite trash anyone for allegedly “refusing to take responsibility for his actions.”)
— Sanders, Delfino complains, “appointed himself gatekeeper of progressivism. The idea was to move the goalposts to exclude Hillary.” But that only begs the question of whether Clinton was ever entitled to be called a progressive in the first place, a subject Delfino entirely avoids. Obviously, this is a fight over the definition of a somewhat amorphous word and maybe it isn’t worth a lot of time but the assumption baked into Delfino’s piece that Clinton was obviously a progressive rubs me the wrong way. Clinton became a political figure on the coattails of her husband, a conservative Southern “New Democrat,” the first chairman, in fact, of the Democratic Leadership Council. The DLC, long despised by progressives and now mercifully extinct, was a corporate-backed project that overtly sought to convince Democrats to abandon progressive values and move to the right. Bill Clinton embraced destructive right-wing priorities on crime, welfare, “free trade,” deficit reduction, foreign interventionism and so on, and when it came to these policies, there was never any daylight between he and Hillary. Bill honed Dick Morris’s “triangulation” strategy for selling all of this, which involved throwing progressives under the bus in order to portray “both sides” as extremists and position oneself as the sensible center, the same strategy Hillary used in various forms throughout both of her presidential bids. Barack Obama defeated her in 2008 by running to her left while she continued playing these games.
During the 2016 cycle, Hillary would, on one occasion, disingenuously insist she was a progressive and always had been, then on another, confess to being a “moderate” and a centrist and extol the virtues of this. Clinton’s triangulation strategy for the primary season was to present Sanders’ forthrightly progressive policies as entirely unrealistic things that would never happen. She went out of her way to alienate progressives at every turn. While she and her surrogates were making a mantra of their talk about the need for unity, she chose Tim Kaine as her running mate over the furious objections of progressives; when Dirty Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was forced to resign over the Wikileaks revelations, Clinton immediately hired her into her campaign. Clinton’s general-election strategy was geared toward appealing to Republicans, spending her time in red states that would never vote for her and touting endorsements of her campaign by a seemingly endless menagerie of rightist figures, even war-criminals. Chuck Schumer openly asserted Democrats would be able to pick up Republicans to replace every Democratic vote they lost. The truth is that Clinton is an unprincipled triangulator whose instincts, in a liberal party, are conservative. Call that what one likes, it’s not a progressive by any definition that has any meaning. Sanders never had to move any goalposts; he just had to point this out. Contrary to Delfino’s laughable assertion that Sanders “ran a vicious, negative campaign,” one of the failings of his campaign is that he refused to aggressively do so
— One of the weak points of your piece — and there are only a few — is in your handling of the Wikileaks business. Delfino goes full-on Trumpanzee in denouncing it as “fake” and presenting it as a ludicrous conspiracy theory. In reality, the emails showed DNC figures anointing Clinton while trashing Sanders, spying on his campaign, plotting strategy against him. The matter of the debate schedule is particularly damning; the DNC abandoned past practices by barring non-sanctioned debates then granted Clinton the low-visibility schedule she requested while entirely ignoring the requests of Martin O’Malley and Sanders (for which there is a paper trail).
