Progressives Disheartened by Turncoat Hillary

After a Democratic Party primary contest that largely featured “me too” liberalism from Hillary Clinton as she was trying to fight off socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Democratic nominee for president has picked a centrist running mate and has spent the last few weeks courting Republicans.

Many supporters of Sanders and other progressives said they are disappointed — but hardly surprised.

“That’s who she is. I don’t know why anybody’s surprised … She’s a neoliberal. She’s part of this neoliberal transformation that took place in the 1980s and runs through today.”

“That’s who she is. I don’t know why anybody’s surprised,” said Les Leopold, executive director of The Labor Institute in New York. “She’s a neoliberal. She’s part of this neoliberal transformation that took place in the 1980s and runs through today.”

Clinton moved left on health care, college tuition, and the minimum wage during the campaign, flip-flopped on her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, and severely downplayed her support for hydraulic fracturing. She had to in order to woo liberals, who were smitten with Sanders.

But that was then.

Since dispatching Sanders, Clinton has taken a number of steps that have left liberals disheartened. Before the Democratic National Convention even started, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton confidante, suggested that Clinton’s expressed opposition to the TPP was for show. Many viewed her selection of Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine to be her running mate as a sellout to Wall Street.

The convention itself featured independent and Republican speakers in an effort to burnish Clinton’s credentials as a leader who can work across the aisle. And over the past several weeks, she has concentrated on lining up endorsements from former Bush administration officials and other Republicans turned off by GOP nominee Donald Trump.

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Moumita Ahmed, a Sanders delegate and lead organizer of Millennials for Bernie Sanders, said that progressives are still leery of Clinton’s vote to authorize the Iraq war during her tenure in the Senate.

“And then you go align yourself with people of the Bush administration?” she said.

Ahmed criticized Tuesday’s hiring of former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar — who has worked as a lobbyist since leaving government — to head Clinton’s transition team. It marks a betrayal of her promise to end the “revolving door” between public service and the private sector, she said.

But Ahmed said Clinton’s behavior is consistent with her career.

“The way I see it is it’s her trying to reach out to the people she knows she can,” she said. “Ultimately, she is conservative. The way the corporate Democratic Party functions is much more conservative than Bernie Sanders or [Massachusetts Sen.] Elizabeth Warren.”

For Clinton, reaching out to moderates and Republicans makes sense in the context of a campaign strategy that seeks to capitalize on divisions within the GOP and unease with Trump among some independents. But Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under Bill Clinton, told The New York Times that running only in opposition to Trump “doesn’t give you a mandate to do anything” after the election.

“If she’s going to get anything done as president, she is going to have to have a mandate,” he told The Times.

Leopold, the New York labor activist, said progressives should not expect much from Clinton without a massive amount of pressure from the people. He said Clinton, like her husband, mostly acts out of political expediency.

“Tactical is what they are. That’s who they’ve always been,” he said. “She’s not going to challenge runaway inequality. Her whole family is wrapped up in it.”

Leopold said Clinton is better than Trump. But he added that he worries less about November than what happens after the election. In order to enact a truly progressive agenda, he said, the movement that Sanders built needs to be re-assembled. He said he is “haunted” by the fear that liberals are too fragmented by their individual causes to pull it off.

Left to her own devices, Leopold said, Clinton is unlikely to hold firm when she faces resistance.

“She’s got to be pressured,” he said. “Somehow, the political spectrum needs to be shifted. And she’ll shift with it.”

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Ahmed said Sanders supporters, in some ways, come from the same profile as those who back Trump. She said Clinton represents the interests of corporations and the wealthy.

“I’m concerned, because that’s not really the base of the Democratic Party,” she said.  “She’s ignoring the people who voted for Bernie. Basically, she’s ignoring the working class … While I believe people will vote for her out of fear, that’s not good for her in the long run.”

Having to choose which is the least-liked candidate is like “having a gun to your head,” Ahmed said.

Not all progressives are down on Clinton. Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said in an emailed response to questions from LifeZette that his organization is confident in the sincerity of Clinton’s opposition to the TPP and her commitment to other progressive ideals.

“Hillary Clinton getting some Republicans to say Donald Trump is unfit to be president is not mutually exclusive with her running on bold progressives ideas like opposing the TPP, debt-free college, expanding Social Security benefits, public option, and Wall Street reform,” he said in the email.