Hillary Clinton Lost Big, Ignoring Collapse of Middle Class

While Hillary Clinton now blames FBI Director James Comey’s investigation of her emails for her loss, sane Democrats realize that it was her refusal to fight Wall Street to improve the the living standards of workers, unemployed, minorities, and rural voters, all with plummeting life expectancies, that explains it.

Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI), who ran the Democratic Party in Michigan, heart of the industrial Midwest for years, wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post Nov. 10, where she said “I said Clinton was in trouble with the voters I represent [but] I was the ‘crazy’ one. I predicted that Hillary Clinton was in trouble in Michigan during the Democratic primary. I noted we could see a Trump presidency [but] they said, ‘That’s Debbie. It’s hyperbole. She’s nuts.'”

Dingell said, “Michigan voters strongly supported Bernie Sanders in the primary. That result didn’t surprise me, but it did infuriate me that Clinton and her team didn’t show up until the weekend before the primary, when it suddenly became clear they had a problem…. [bernie] Sanders was in my district 10 times during the primary,” (talking about economic issues and Glass-Steagall, and taking down Wall Street.) “How would any sane person not predict how this one would go? It was fixable for the General Election,” but she went to Arizona, instead of to the Midwest industrial heartland. Bill Clinton reportedly strenuously opposed Hillary’s mistake of not campaigning in the Midwest, and went there alone to campaign several times. No Democratic Presidential candidate had lost Michigan for 28 years.

In an article making frequent reference to Bernie Sanders’ book, Our Revolution, David Weigel writes, “The more important the issue is to large numbers of people, the less interesting it is to corporate media…. Sanders had been saying the same thing about the oligarchy for 30 years, and suddenly found the 14 million voters agreed with him. In his book, Sanders points to his prophetic comment in one of the early debates, where he tried to talk about economics: ‘The middle class of this country is collapsing. Enough about her emails!’ to no avail.” Weigel says for the media, politicians like Sanders were characters in a larger story about how Clinton would take power. Sanders says: “I was gently faulted for having excessive ‘message discipline,’ for spending too much time discussing real issues. Boring.” On CBS News’ “Face the Nation” today, Sanders said, “If Mr. Trump has the courage to take on Wall Street, I will work with him, issue by issue…. The Democrats have become the party that raises billions of dollars from wealthy people and puts ads on television.”

The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald hits the liberals in an op-ed in Sunday’s Post also. “Trump will have vast powers, thanks to Obama. We have a President-elect with authoritarian tendencies assuming a presidency that has never been more powerful. When liberals opposed all the `executive powers’ given to Bush and Obama, the ‘tactic of last resort’ used to be to ask them to think about how one day, these powers could be in the hands of someone other than a benevolent, worthy progressive — rather a right-wing authoritarian. That day has arrived.”