US presidential politics: Bernie Sanders makes history

For months, the candidates of the Republican Party have thoroughly embarrassed themselves, their party and their country with their adolescent brawling, name calling and exchanges of insults. When they attempted to address issues of moment, they mostly switched from abusing each other to abusing President Barack Obama. You wondered how persons so immature could be aspiring to the US presidency.

Donald Trump is the very worst: for uncouthness and incivility in high places, the man will surely go down in the Guinness Book of Records.  You would have to go back to the early 19th century and dig deep in the archives to find anything comparable in US electoral history. Shallow, bereft of ideas, and ignorant of world politics or diplomacy beyond a few sound-bites, the wonder of it is that Trump has nevertheless been the Republican front runner. The more farcical he got, the more votes he won. And he is quite likely to win the nomination.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be so surprising in a country so thoroughly sold on “entertainment” that the “reality show,” so artless, uncrafted and morally confused, is treated as a major television art form. And Donald Trump is the emperor of the “reality show.” He virtually pioneered the form with “The Apprentice,” a show focused on aspiring  entrepreneurs and valorizing some common practices of the American corporate environment. In that show, Emperor Trump is all-powerful, and never so pompous and full of himself as when he screws his lips into a tight round hole and spits out “You’re fhiyered!!” to some hapless fellow who must now quit the show. No wonder he must think that the race for the presidency is just another “reality show”; and, apparently, so do his followers. And the media, which can’t always find its bearings, devotes some 80 percent of their footage and analysis on Trump’s daily boorishness, to the neglect of other would-be-serious candidates.

The Republican “reality show” has been at once disgusting and fascinating to watch. By contrast, the Democratic candidates and their debates have been relatively dull and devoid of drama, devoted as they have been to serious issues of national and international importance. Besides, the two remaining Democratic candidates are in their sixties and seventies, and they “don’t play.” But when the primary elections shifted to high-powered New York, a shivering excitement did indeed build up around the Democratic debate scheduled for Thursday April 14.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders did not disappoint. Each is loaded with years of political experience. Sanders was born and bred in New York City, graduated in political science from the University of Chicago, moved to the state of Vermont in his late 20s, entered politics, served for a decade as Mayor of Burlington, and ended up on the national scene as a Congressman and then a Senator. He is a fiery orator.

Mrs Clinton, a Yale-educated lawyer, was First Lady when her husband Bill Clinton was Governor of the state of Arkansas, and again when he was US President. After that, she settled in New York, got elected to the Senate, ran for president in 2008 and would have made it but for the formidable Barack Obama. For four years she served as Secretary of State (Minister of External Affairs) under Obama. Of all the candidates she is by far the best qualified and best prepared, and she would make history as America’s first woman president.

This, then, was a contest between two New Yorkers for the political soul of the city and state. Clinton is way ahead of Sanders in the polls, but Sanders is slowly gaining on her. Their debate was all fireworks. It showed quite clearly that Sanders is an idealist, a dreamer of America as it ought to be, while Hillary is a pragmatist who is willing and able to wheel and deal and compromise, especially with a hard-headed Congress of self-interested politicians (many of them beholden to special interests), in order to achieve cumulative fragments of those same goals she shares with Sanders.

The debate reached its climax when Sanders did what no other American politician, presidential candidate or president has done since World War II. While conceding that Israel must defend itself when attacked, Sanders berated Israeli leaders for “over-reacting” to provocations from their Arab neighbors, for responding with overwhelming force far out of proportion to Arab acts of violence or terrorism; and for refusing to negotiate in good faith for inviolable living space for the Palestinians, the Arab occupants of the territory whom they met when they returned home after nearly two thousand years of dispersion and exile.

Hillary Clinton responded that when she mediated between Israel and her neighbors she always spoke in favor of living space for the Palestinians. Indeed, official US policy has spoken for a separate Palestinian state, but the matter has remained under negotiation for years. The difference is this: that no US politician or high government official has ever publicly criticized Israeli leaders, certainly not in the unequivocal terms of Bernie Sanders. They may do so in private, but never in public. It is said that to do so is to send the wrong signal to those Arab nations who have sworn to “drive the Israelis into the sea” and obliterate the state of Israel. What in addition is spoken only in whispers is that the Jewish lobby is so powerful that any American politician who openly criticizes Israel is committing political suicide.

How then did Bernie Sanders get to make such history? Simple: Sanders is a man of great courage who doesn’t mince his words. Besides, he is himself a Jew, therefore immune from the wrath. . . .

Onwuchekwa Jemie