An Open Letter to Clinton Supporters and the Clinton Campaign From a Bernie Sanders Supporter

4/21/2016

There will be more science fiction fun fairly soon, but for a moment I'm going to take an aside to talk politics politely.

Dear Clinton Supporters and the Clinton Campaign,

For the last few months I’ve been the guy who has talked down other Bernie Sanders supporters when they say they won’t vote for Clinton if she gets the nomination. I’ve done it over and over at this point, and every single time I did it I 100% believed it when I told them why Hillary would be a great 2nd choice. The last few weeks though have more than soured me. I can’t even remember what I said at this point, and I can’t give a better argument than that we need to vote for her because Trump and Cruz will lay waste to the civil rights of millions.

That’s a pretty big deal. I’m definitely 100% voting for Clinton if Sanders does not get the nomination… But I’ve lost all passion for campaigning for or supporting her. I hit a breaking point this week when after Clinton won New York a Senior Clinton Staffer was quoted by Politico saying this about Bernie Sanders: “f--- him.” I thought this statement was horrid, uncivil, and worthy of an apology. However, when I brought it up online, plenty of Clinton supporters seemed to agree. Some joined in the chorus of “f--- him,” some made excuses for why it was okay for someone to say that. Hey guess what—it isn’t. And I shouldn’t need to explain outside of a Trump rally why “f--- Him” isn’t civil discourse.

I agree with Bernie Sanders a lot. According to those silly internet quizzes, I agree with him around 98%. So, “f--- him”? What does that mean they think of me?

This wasn’t the first straw though. That was just the last straw, and just a good and recent example. Truth is, I don’t feel welcome anymore in the Clinton campaign, and don’t feel excited about it anymore. And I know I’m not alone in this: I’ve heard this from plenty of other Sanders supporters. "If we lose, are we going to back Clinton fully? … Should we?" When our genuine concerns are so often treated as foolhardy or naïve? When it’s beginning to feel like our votes are taken for granted? So no, I’m not excited anymore.

But I want to be.

I want to believe in Hillary Clinton. I want to believe that she will work to build a better future for this country, and not just churn the status quo we have. I want to believe she’ll be willing to listen to the concerns of Bernie’s base if she wins the nomination. I want to live in a country where my friend’s civil rights aren’t constantly in danger of being removed, where our healthcare is safe and functional, where people rights aren’t violated, where children don’t have to take on a mountain of debt like I did to get an education. I want to believe.

So, you think Clinton is going to be the nominee? Make me care again. Convince me. Convince us.

There is a comments section on this article, use it. Tell me why I should be excited about Hillary Clinton. Because I’d like to be, and there are plenty of other Sanders supporters who feel the same. I’ll post the best arguments I find in a second blog post.
Thanks, take care. Vote for Bernie 2016.
-James Wylder

A few rules and helpful suggestions (I reserve the right to delete any and all comments that do not follow the guidelines below):
-Don’t try to convince me to vote for Clinton in the primaries. That ship has sailed.
-If you want me to take you seriously, don’t talk down to me and tell me, “When I’m older…” I’m not older right now; I’m the age I am right now. Convince me now, not hypothetical future me.
-No hate speech. No slurs. Keep your language PG-13.
-No endorsements for other candidates, products, or general off topic points.
-Please be civil.

16 Comments

Gwen

4/26/2016 09:32:03 am

I'm not the campaigning type, so I won't be the one to get you excited about Clinton again but I do urge you to take a step back for a second. Look at the presidential campaign environment as a whole. It's a very emotionally charged election, especially this far into primary season. There is a lot of hate flying around, and sometimes people say ugly things when they're passionate about something. Is it worthwhile to pull your support from someone you otherwise believe in because of something an overworked campaign staffer let slip to a reporter? Or because of how commenters reacted when you brought it up (because we all know the best of humanity comes out in the comment section)? I understand your disappointment in the level of discourse, because I feel it too, but it's certainly not limited to the Clinton campaign. Nor is it remotely in her control. If you want to get excited about Clinton again, focus on her platform and agenda—on what she would do with the office if she wins it. Personally, I can envision her as a capable, level-headed and resolute president whom I can be proud to have elected. So, that's why she has my vote. What her other supporters do and say is their own business.

James Wylder

4/27/2016 01:54:04 pm

You make some really good points Gwen. Both you and Luther think I should take a step back for a bit, and that might be a good idea. Elections get intense, and since its become clear Clinton is the winner (despite Bernie fighting it out to the end, as he should), there will doubtless be some tensions.

I am curious: are there any parts of Clinton's platform that excite you?

"Level headed and resolute." A good endorsement. I'll remember that. Thank you.

Luther M. Siler link

4/27/2016 08:40:47 am

Okay. First things first, and in all seriousness: disconnect for a little while. A week or two. Mute all the politics people in your Twitter feed and hide anyone on Facebook who's likely to gloat. Without trying to justify it, because it's just reality, one team just won and they're gonna do some gloating even if gloating isn't the smart or nice thing to do. I think the best thing to do is just let them have their moment and walk away for a minute. You do not need to be enthusiastic about voting for Hillary Clinton in April. The election's in November. You have time to be mad/upset/disillusioned that your guy didn't win. It's okay.

That said.

I have said some terrible things about Hillary Clinton. If my 2008-era blog were still online, I could point you at some of them. And I'll be proudly voting for her in a few days and again in several months. There are a bunch of reasons why that's the case; I'll touch on several of them. And I'll say this right now: there will be people (you may or may not be some of them) who can look at my reasons to vote for her and see them as reasons to not trust her. I'm aware of that, but these are MY reasons, so I don't have to care. :-)

This will get longish, so I'm hitting Submit now. And I reserve the right to post this on my own blog later. :-)

4/27/2016 08:53:10 am

I look forward to reading the rest, and please do reuse it on your own blog. I'd simply request that you give a link back to this blog to encourage others to give me and others more reasons to be enthusiastic :).

4/27/2016 08:48:18 am

My first reason to be happy to vote for Hillary is one that I know is probably going to catch me some crap: I am deliriously happy to be able to cast a vote for a woman for President. Period. We can argue about whether identity politics are "good reasons," but ultimately I don't care. We elected Obama; now I want a woman President. I want the stranglehold white men have on the corridors of power in this country broken, and this is another big crack in that foundation. Others may feel differently; that's fine.

Second: one of the things I was very likely to tell people in 2008 about Barack Obama was that they should watch his campaign to see how he'll govern. Obama ran a master-class campaign in 2008. Clinton did not, and she paid for it. She has-- and this is a theme with her-- watched and learned from her mistakes, and she is a VASTLY better candidate in 2016 than she ever was in 2008. People give her crap about changing her opinion, and only adopting more leftward positions when forced to. I see someone who's willing to change her mind and learn from her mistakes. She's running a clean, leak-free, no-drama campaign for office this year, and her advisors and the people close to her are all competent and doing their jobs. I was LIVID at some of the (edits out a swear word) crap her campaign manager and some of her prime surrogates were pulling in 2008, and I know this isn't about Bernie, but one of my problems with him is that he's not controlling his people. I know the candidate can't control their base, but they CAN tell their campaign staff to shut their yaps and do their jobs.

Hitting Submit again.

4/27/2016 08:56:11 am

Third, and again this was a reason I frequently cited when I voted for Obama: I want the President to be clearly and obviously smarter than I am. Obama has spent his Presidency being the smartest guy in the room, and when I hear Clinton talk, while I don't think she's at his level (very, very few are, I think) I hear someone who is in full command of the details and the minutia of policy and someone smart enough to know their own mind and understand the nuances of what they're trying to do. This has hurt her in the past (one of the big complaints about her health care bill was how complicated it was) but I need that from a Presidential candidate. She's got the facts and figures and numbers at her fingertips, and she earned a reputation in the Senate of being 1) a very hard worker and 2) someone who was not afraid to get into the weeds of a new subject rather than rely on advisors. I want that type of person in the Oval Office, and I think she's the only person in the race who IS that type of person. Maybe Cruz, actually; there are lots of reasons to vote against him but "he doesn't know what he's doing" is generally not one of them.

She's a team player. I was very, VERY worried in 2008 about the PUMAs not coming home to Obama after the convention-- much, much more worried than I have been about Bernie's supporters. And then Hillary waded into the crowd at the floor of the convention and called for Obama to be nominated by acclamation. That was the first moment I'd been personally inspired by her, and it IMMEDIATELY revised my opinion of her up several points. She lost, she got over it, and she immediately went to work for her former opponent. No drama. She has worked hard to fund-raise for down-ticket Democratic candidates and she understands something that I think is critical for this race-- that the President can't do it alone, and if we want real change, just holding on to the White House isn't enough-- we HAVE TO change Congress, and we have to recapture more of the states. If she had lost this election, I have absolutely no doubt that she'd have worked as hard to get Sanders elected as she did for Obama.

Submit.

4/27/2016 09:04:18 am

Finally, and this ties in with my first point, I find a lot of the reasons people cite to NOT vote for Clinton to be, frankly, unconvincing.

I do not care about speaking fees. I care about RESULTS. I do not believe that Hillary Clinton, to pick one example, would not to work to rein in campaign finance because something something Wall Street. I've literally laughed at people for suggesting she doesn't want Citizens United overturned. Citizens United existed so that right-wingers had a clever way to call Hillary Clinton a c*nt.

Is she ambitious? Absolutely. This is true of every single Presidential candidate in the history of forever. I think that she catches more crap for it than she has any reason to because she's a woman. Is she untrustworthy? I don't think so, and, again: "untrustworthy" and "ambitious" are words men use to describe powerful women. I want to be clear; I don't think everyone voting for Sanders or against Hillary is a sexist, but I DO think sexism very much plays a role in the way we describe her.

Is she warm, empathetic, kind? Maybe. Sometimes. And I feel like she's, again, done a much better job during this campaign of letting her personality out and being less outwardly controlled. But I don't need the President to be my mother. We've got countless examples of male politicians where "I'm a hardass" is virtually their entire reason for their candidacies; I do not need a female Presidential candidate to be huggable.

(Obama ran into a similar thing. He couldn't ever be angry, because he knew that as soon as he got genuinely mad about something it would get turned back against him because he was a black man. Hillary is in a similar spot.)

Submit.

4/27/2016 09:17:56 am

The start of this is probably the least helpful of all the parts of your thing for me, because I do care about speaking fees and "something something Wall Street". Those are actually major issues for me, and many.

They're things I legitimately feel still need to be addressed.

I don't need her to be huggable, or whatever, but there are plenty of reasons to feel genuine uncomfortable-ness with her Wall Street ties. Shoving those concerns in the back of my mind is difficult.

The rest of the post other than that, A+.

Caela Maynard

4/27/2016 12:17:38 pm

I'd like to point out that while smaller they are, Bernie has investments in both Wallstreet and fracking.

I'm suspicious of a candidate that criticizes an opponent for the same thing that they're guilty of, not only in the case of his money, but also in the fact that he voted in favor of at least three wars, one 1999 that didn't have any provisionaries and another that allotted funds for Bush's attacks (he also insisted on supporting Bush's failed efforts).

I think it's very telling in the way that Betnie is able to get away with so many things. Perhaps the personal investments are admissible but I'm honestly over how he can do no wrong and how he's depicted as some perfect white savior.

4/27/2016 01:41:08 pm

I'm really not sure what your goal is in the context of this blog post Caela? If you're tired of Bernie as a candidate, congratulations: its mathematically impossible he will win after yesterday. He'd need to win every remaining state by ridiculous double digit percentages to achieve victory at this point.

I could go through each of your points I guess, and get into a debate about them... but what's the point? I side with Bernie on nearly every issue, far more than I do with Hillary, and I know we disagree on this.

I don't think he is perfect, and never have. There are parts of his platform that could be stronger (gun control, for one), he has had trouble keeping some of his surrogates on target ( the nasty "corporate whores" comment a speaker made, for example).

But that isn't what we're talking about here: we're talking about Clinton being the (at this point, while not official, definite, when I started this post it was "highly likely") nominee. Bernie Sanders not being a perfect candidate doesn't remove issues individual voters might have. It doesn't mean I'm still not concerned about her Wall Street ties.

The point here being: your concerns about Sanders, however well founded or grounded don't make me excited to campaign for Hillary Clinton when she becomes the nominee. This is the entire point of this letter. This election has too much at stake. I want to be motivated, excited. I'm not. I want Clinton to win because the alternative would be a living hell for tons of people under Cruz or Trump, but I was there when everyone tried to pretend they were excited for Kerry because he wasn't Bush X_X ... I don't want that to happen again. I don't want to take this election for granted.

And I want to show reasons to my friends who are Sanders supporters like myself why we should be excited-- why we should put our hearts into it and not just shamble over to the voting booth. I might not have much range of voice, but this process should start.

I'm still voting for Sanders in the Indiana primary. I want the issues he has been fighting for to get every chance. But he won't be the nominee, and Clinton needs to win in November for the sake of so many people. So I'll be voting for Clinton then.

But there are months to change people's minds, and I want more to tell them than, "Well, she's better than the alternative."

4/27/2016 09:09:15 am

This should probably have been in the last paragraph: I also find accusations that she's a warmonger to be unconvincing. Is she more hawkish than Sanders? Sure. So am I. But the idea that she's going to start six wars the day after she enters office is flatly ridiculous, ESPECIALLY in a context where her opponents on the other side have literally and unapologetically threatened to glass the entire Middle East as if it wasn't a big deal.

Anyway. I have no idea if all of this is doing you any good, and I can easily imagine a hypothetical Sanders supporter who is already chomping at the bit to go through what I've written it and exhaustively dissect it bit-by-bit. (I don't think YOU are that hypothetical supporter, mind you, but I suspect one's out there somewhere.) But I've already written about twice in my comments what you did in your post, so I've probably reached the "okay you can shut up now" moment. I'm going to ignore this thread for a few hours and come back later to see if anyone has any questions or anything. I hope this has been useful.

Josephine Smiley

4/27/2016 01:51:00 pm

Everything Jim said here also applies to me, by the way. I have fought hard for Bernie, I've put my education and my future career and my mental health on the line for him. Now.... I still support him all the way, but I have to admit there is a possibility that Hillary will be the Democratic nominee. I know how third parties and write-in candidates work in the current American political system: they don't. They split votes. That's how we get Republican presidents. So I will probably have to vote for Hillary in the general election.
So consider this comment my official endorsement of Jim's post. Jim's not alone, and we all want to know why we should vote for her.

4/27/2016 02:12:52 pm

Fair enough.

Hillary has a history of implementing progressive policies that benefit minirities and the poor. She's supported progressive tax policies that demand the wealthier pay their share (debatable if it worked but she did back those efforts), she fought to extend emergency unemployment benefits, she worked to increase health coverage for millions of low income children through the State Children's Health Insurance Program as First Lady and she's devoted her time to issues regarding education for low income children. In the senate she supported increasing the minimum wage and was a cosponsor of the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007. She has been actively fighting the poor and disadvantaged, as well as having a record of supporting women's issues. She has voted against repealing the estate tax on millionaires and opposed Bush tax cuts.

She has actively been fighting against an oligarchy via her voting habits and policies. It's detrimental to the poor who have benefited or will benefit from her policies when people continuously depict the opposite of what she has done. Those actions alone demonstrate her dedication to the poor and of course the minorities impacted by inaccessible education and healthcare. She has been doing this long before she decided to officially run.

Furthermore, Hillary has a long time history of getting support from both major parties, a feat that I believe made more impressive as a woman in politics, seeing as there's a lot of sexism thrown in.

On another note-I don't care about winning or victory dances. I'm mad that Bernie wasn't something more. But I'm grateful to him in the sense that he has pushed Hillary to be more progressive, something I believe she needed. The simple fact of the matter is that I come from an extremely poor family that will either directly benefit from her implementations (she's going to get some of them through-her history shows that), and your vote would help. I'm relieved that despite being upset and disillusioned, you're still devoted to helping people. And Hillary will help some people, as she had done in the past.

And I'm just as disappointed in Bernie's losses, but for a different reason.

Rebecca J

4/27/2016 02:47:25 pm

I voted for Bernie yesterday and it's looking very likely that I'll be voting for Hilary in the fall, and there are a lot of voters who are going to take that same path. But just because we may ultimately have to shift our support to another candidate doesn't mean all of our concerns and the reasons we chose to support Bernie in the first place will disappear after the nomination is set. I think the fear that we'll be swept under the rug is a valid one. We know that if we want a Democrat in the White House next year we have to work together. But I agree with Jim, and I agree with Josephine. Why should we be excited to vote for Hilary?

4/27/2016 04:38:46 pm

Two points:

1) I think, in general, we're slightly overrating the value of "excitement" when choosing a Presidential candidate.

2) That said, as I pointed out earlier, the part of voting for her that makes me happiest is that, for the first time in my life, I'm voting for "her" for President and not "him." Even if you disagree with her politics, I feel like that should be worth some excitement value. I am very much looking forward to the first time I hear her referred to as "Madam President," and I'm even sort of excited about the inevitable argument about what to call Bill.

4/29/2016 06:44:32 pm

1. I don't think anyone here is "picking" a president based on excitement. We're picking a president on issues, and myself, Josephine, and Rebecca all stated we're voting for Hillary if no Bernie.
Excitement is an issue if we have no passion leading up to November, the time when the conversations we'll have with other Sanders supporters and friends happens.

2. True!

James Wylder, Writer