Neither U.S. Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton with now 2,200, nor challenger Bernie Sanders, with just over 1,800, can reach the required 2,384 delegate votes before 712 super delegates vote during the last week of July.
Which is long ways off in politics. Currently, Clinton is favoured by 580 and Sanders by 50 of those appointed 712, give or take a few.
Republican and Democratic party executives long have had a contract to operate as one party when it comes to crushing popular nonconformists like Dennis Kucinich in 2008, or now Sanders.
The powerful bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, with its mandate and arsenal of undemocratic manipulation tools to sideline popular candidates, is only one of their instruments.
Presumed Republican candidate Donald Trump who, like other sitting or aspiring dictators, already talks about the presidency in terms of a one-branch government, without acknowledging democratic institutions like Congress, the Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court, future elections or state governments, is a game changer.
He might yet put the fear of God into the elitists in the Democratic Party, such as the appointed super delegates. They typically prefer a Republican president over a populist one of their own.
However, the FBI’s criminal investigation of Clinton may also take her down in a heartbeat.
This is what the premature or fake nomination of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate by The Associated Press in collaboration (leaked) with the Clinton campaign was all about. On the eve of the California primary, it was timed for a massive vote suppression and distortion.
Ordinary folks and especially young Sanders supporters tend to sacrifice more for the effort than wealthier Clinton supporters in the lengthy, time-consuming primary lineups.
The lie that it was all over made some stay at work or home, and unfairly gave extra percentages to Clinton.
Cautiously put, Clinton is one of the most negatively viewed public figures across the U.S.
Unappreciated by political experts’ tunnel vision inside the Washington Beltway fish tank, in the general public she loses against the straight-shooting Sanders.
And, importantly, she does much less well than Senator Sanders against Trump.
Polling her against the unpredictable conman Trump is a close thing at this point.
But when the chips are down, her disingenuous air and double-talking track record might come up short. That’s especially when debating this so far very intuitive and successful knife-fighter, who only bloodied 17 Republican primary contenders.
The danger for a national and international stage that the Philadelphia Democratic Party convention will have to deal with is a clear-cut one.
All the oxygen of the entire 2016 presidential primaries consists of breathing anti-establishment sentiment.
It was sowed in decades by neoliberal promoters, for Wall Street crime, militarism, stopping access to health care or education and for fracking the climate, like hawkish Hillary Clinton.
Testimony in 2004 by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, from an interview with veteran journalist Bill Moyers, has recently gone viral.
It concerned Clinton, who flip-flopped on the forever returning bankruptcy bill. It starves and milks poor people by forbidding them bankruptcy, which, as First Lady, she had opposed.
Warren: “This is a bill that is like a vampire; it will not die. There is a lot of money behind it.”
Moyers: “Bill [Clinton], her husband had vetoed it.”
Warren: “Her husband had vetoed it very much at her urging.”
Moyers: “And?”
Warren: “She voted in favour of it ... she has taken money from the [bank] groups and, more to the point, she worries about them as a constituency.”
Warren closeup saw Clinton’s lack of moral fibre as she had face-to-face, comprehensively as law professor, briefed the law-educated First Lady on the consumer credit industry.
The big banks attack freedom with a version of debt bondage by astronomic interest rates on payday loans that are even more extreme than in Canada, for example.
Senator Warren’s June 9 endorsement for primary candidate Clinton gave pause to reflect on deeply corrupted mentalities.
Warren’s up to that point untarnished record is recognized as founder of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and as a long-time political ally of Sanders.
Jill Stein, the Green Party presumptive presidential candidate, knows upholding integrity and accountability is a long game.
On June 9, interviewed on Democracy Now, she cut to the bone of the Democratic Party’s dilemma: “We are rushing towards war with Hillary Clinton, who has a track record."
“And on climate, H.C. established an office to promote fracking around the world, while Secretary of State. So the terrible things that we expect from Donald Trump, we’ve actually already seen from H.C.”
“The lesser evil very much makes inevitable the greater evil, because people don’t come out to vote for a politician that is throwing them under the bus ... they need you to be afraid of them, because they are not for you.”
Self-appointed town crier and false populist Trump quite possibly cannot lose if the only anti-establishment candidate of both parties, Senator Sanders, is pushed out by continued fraudulent manipulation.
Vote suppression as in California and New York, vote counting fraud like in Iowa, biased super delegates and unbalanced sleaze journalism are running rampant since the Democratic Party primaries started converging toward a Trumpastrophy.
Preventing totalitarian disaster could turn out to be the patriotic and legal obligation super delegates will eventually have to answer for.
Their vote for Sanders further will offer them opportunity to correct and atone for already orchestrated election fraud.
Calling to heel a rising populist movement with deep American roots is useless.
It will work no more than a newborn will go back into the mother’s womb in case its behaviour is not pleasing to everyone.
Once Clinton would be finally anointed, irretrievable chaos will have started.
Sanders supporters, except for a few, will not vote for Trump, but experience shows that insulted and backstabbed people are electorally demobilized and stay home.
It’s a fact that elections are decided not by winning over votes but by turning out the support base.
Bernie Sanders has no problem there, as Clinton supporters are left of Clinton on many accounts: militarism, her Honduras or Libya regime changes as well as a renewed cold war encircling of China and Russia, medicare suppression, financialization, undemocratic free trade deals and unprecedented anti-Mexican deportations that legitimize Trump’s racism.
History bears out that standing on principle improves a people’s practical survival chances often more than shortsighted tactical betrayals.
President John F. Kennedy, who set a high standard for presidents to come, learned and understood that.
With the Trump/Clinton symbiosis, we may be rapidly entering into a dynamic of history JFK once had wisely warned against.
The realization that militarist and imperialist advisors had gulled him to escalate aggression against Cuba and Vietnam made him more mindful and inspired him to initiate the international Alliance for Progress.
On its first anniversary in March 1962, JFK poignantly highlighted social justice and democratic rights: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Peter Becker is Whitehorse energy consultant.
By Peter Becker
