14 February 2016
Bernie Sanders and the Upton Sinclair nightmare scenario
Cartoon in the Los Angeles Examainer
This is the worst case scenario for the Democratic establishment. In 1934, muckraking novelist (The Jungle) and socialist Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination for governor of California, receiving more votes than the Republican nominee, sitting governor Frank “Old Baldy” Merrian. Sinclair’s EPIC (End Poverty in California) project proposed public works programs to put people back to wor.
Sinclair led Merrian after Labor Day, scaring the bejesus out of the California establishment, which unleashed a scorched earth campaign against him that was as dirty as it was sophisticated and effective. The definitive account of the campaign is Greg Mitchell’s THE CAMPAIGN OF THE CENTURY: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics, now available as a $4.99 ebook. But Harold Meyerson’s 5,000-word essay, Bernie and the New Left, neatly summarizes how Sinclair was taken down.
Conservative Democrats refused to support Sinclair, and Roosevelt did a masterful job of equivocating, happily meeting with Sinclair but never actually endorsing him. Nonetheless, Sinclair’s lead held up until the Republicans mounted a breathtaking counterattack with a month to go before the election. The newspapers refused to cover Sinclair’s events and statements and joined in a campaign to demonize him. MGM Studios assigned a director, a production crew and a cast of extras to shoot films depicting dangerous-looking characters (the extras) telling an interviewer (a studio contract player) that they were coming to California as soon as Sinclair took office—and then had these films, labeled as newsreels, screened in every movie theater in the state. Sinclair, who’d never been subjected to this kind of attack and lacked the resources to respond, went down to defeat, even as Democrats were sweeping to victory in other states.
Sanders increasingly appears as politically adept as Sinclair was inept, but the thought that the American people would elect a socialist as their president still seems a stretch. Anyone with a radical past has things that can be dredged up. The past two Democratic presidents, neither of whom was remotely radical, were accused of radical ties—Bill Clinton of doing something nefarious (his accusers couldn’t say what, exactly) while he was a young man visiting the Soviet Union; Barack Obama of befriending (actually, attending several events with) long-ago members of the Weather Underground. What could Republicans dig up on Sanders, who really did hang with radicals, who was one himself? Hillary Clinton can’t make such attacks for fear of alienating Sanders supporters; Republicans will make them constantly.
For millennials, of course, socialism doesn’t connote the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia. It connotes our European allies, whose socialist and social democratic parties have won their citizens free health care and college, paid vacation guarantees, and state-provided child care. That helps explain millennials’ attraction to socialism, as well as their inability to see how Republicans will exploit Sanders’s socialism to repel older voters.
Meyerson patronizes millennials, but he’s not wrong to worry that if Democrats nominate Sanders, an epic red-baiting campaign against him will follow, possibly with Wall Street Democrats defecting to the Republicans. Along with the entire Democratic establishment, he fears that not only would Sanders lose in a landslide, but that the landslide would bury dozens, perhaps hundreds, of down ticket Democratic candidates.
But Meyerson fails to hold the Democratic establishment responsible for this situation.
Bernie Sanders is a stronger candidate than conventional Democratic thinking was able to imagine, his 33 years in elective office notwithstanding. He started as a protest candidate, using his campaign as a soapbox for exhorting Democrats to renounce their Wall Street ways and to embrace single-payer health care and free public education through college. Against strong Democratic opponents, Sanders would have stayed a protest campaign, being heard, growing in strength, but not having a legitimate chance of becoming his party’s nominee.
But he wasn’t running against strong Democratic candidates. He was running against Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley.
Had Clinton announced that she wasn’t running again, younger Democrats would have sought the nomination. Instead, her selfishness prevailed. Her status within the party, abetted by connivers like Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, cleared the field for what she and her supporters and sycophants believed would be a cakewalk. Now Sanders, like Obama in 2008, has exposed her as a flawed and weak candidate who has alienated a large segment of the Democratic Party, which now is in grave danger of losing the White House if Sanders is nominated — and in grave danger of losing it if Clinton is nominated.