This post is a very easy one to write, because it is, in effect, a simple question: Will Hillary Clinton represent the interests of the working people of America?
Hillary: here is a woman who has “served” as First Lady of Arkansas, then First Lady of the USA, and then as a Senator, and then as Secretary of State. Her professional life has, for all intents and purposes, been a purely political one. And yet, through her connections, her contacts and her skill in manipulating the system, she has managed to parlay this “political career” into a fortune worth $32,000,000.
Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, has been a “real” political animal. During the same period that Hillary was amassing her fortune through an “establishment” political career, Bernie served as a city Mayor, a Congressman and a Senator, all the while running on his famous “Democratic Socialist” platform. The result? Bernie has a net worth of just $330,000.
So here is the question: how is it that two candidates, who many claim have the same priorities and the same goals, could both dedicate their lives to politics, to “fighting for the working families” – and yet one ends up with $32 million, and the other ends up with just $330K?
I think this is a big part of the reason that people do not like the Clintons. They are a political family., they have been making their living in political “service” to their state and then their country for virtually all of their adult lives and yet they have managed to amass an incredible fortune while supposedly “serving” the public.
No one begrudged the Roosevelts their wealth, nor the Kennedys theirs. Even Mitt Romney was generally considered to have “earned” his fortune. And Donald Trump has become famous almost solely for his success as a businessman. In other words, they “earned” their money in the American way.
But the Clintons? They are simply “America’s Political Family.” They have never done anything else. And yet they travel in the same circles as the Trumps and the Romneys, the Kennedys, etc.. Indeed, it is now widely known that the Clintons went to Trump’s last wedding, and Trump’s daughter Ivanka is best friends with Chelsea Clinton.
And this brings us to the Big Difference. Bernie Sanders is a true believer. He is motivated by a genuine desire to help people, to speak truth to power, and as he says so often in his speeches, he wants to use his political position to “take on the billionaire class.”
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has used her political positions to become PART of that “billionaire class.” And she revels in it. And that is, I think, why people in the US don’t like her. She literally embodies all that is wrong with the calcified, corrupt and money-driven political system that is running America today.
She is, in essence, the poster-girl for Bernie’s “political revolution” and that fact will come out over the course of the campaign.
Feel The Bern!!
NOTE: this post is continued in a very important way HERE.
EuroYankee is a dual citizen, US-EU. He travels around Europe, writing on politics, culture and such. He pays his US taxes so he gets to weigh in on what is happening in the States.
