The Barre and Montpelier, Vermont Times Argus Endorsement Hillary Clinton [View all]
Bernie Sanders appears poised for a runaway victory in the Vermont presidential primary on Tuesday, an extraordinary outcome in an extraordinary year during which he has mounted a serious and substantive challenge to the front-runner, Hillary Clinton. This paper, nevertheless, endorses Clinton for president.
This endorsement rests on Clinton’s breadth of experience and her proven commitment to those many issues where she shares a progressive outlook with Sanders. The very notion of political experience has taken on a negative connotation in this surprising year because voters associate it with compromise and corruption. But outsider status, which Sanders has always enjoyed, does not automatically confer wisdom or ability. Clinton’s experience as a hard-working, policy-oriented senator and a secretary of state who restored the good name of the United States weighs heavily in her favor.
The contest between Clinton and Sanders has been framed as a choice between pragmatism and idealism, between incrementalism and boldness. Framing it that way oversells what Sanders offers. Fighting for health care reform, as Clinton has done for a quarter century, has been an exercise in idealism. It has been a long, difficult fight against powerful entrenched interests. The Clinton administration didn’t succeed in the 1990s. The Obama administration has made significant progress, and Clinton is right to underscore the importance of that victory.
It’s easy to hold out the promise of grand solutions. On Sanders’ part these would include a Medicare-for-all, single-payer health care system and free college for everybody. These are lofty and worthy goals; Medicare-for-all was Ted Kennedy’s idea. But Clinton is willing to be square with the American people in acknowledging that getting to those goals would be a step-by-step process, requiring the kind of painstaking work she did as a senator.
Sanders’ millions of followers respond by saying that if we sign on to the movement he is leading we can achieve these goals. If we would only throw the bums out of Congress who are standing in the way, then the political revolution would be at hand.
That is a big if. We can all wish for it to happen, but the world of 2017 is likely to look differently than we wish it would. Clinton’s more thorough and realistic understanding of domestic policy would probably be better suited to that world.
http://www.timesargus.com/article/20160228/OPINION01/160229683/1021
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