At some point early on in the primary season people around here picked sides. If they picked Hillary they quickly stopped viewing the race as a contest people people with policies and ideas, and viewed it as a race between the “Probable Nominee” (PN) and the “Trouble Maker.” (TM) I don’t blame anyone for this choice and the mindset that resulted from it. That lens is exactly how I would have viewed the race if I had picked Clinton, and trust me I was within a single micron of picking Clinton.
Like the Clinton supporters here, I would have viewed any attack on the policies of the PN as a weakening the PN in the upcoming general election. I would have looked at TM with scorn and shut out his transparently liberal and Democratic message because it was not something that “helped” the PM in the long run. I would have had an a moral compass that narrowed my thinking to stark black and white and provoked venomous pronouncements that supporters of the TM were reading off of Mitch McConnell’s play book.
But that is all behind us now. Now the trouble maker can be viewed as a man named Bernie Sanders. Now we Democrats can look at his policies and proposals in the clear light of day and ask ourselves if they are things that we Democrats, that all Americans who value peace and justice can support. We can turn our attention to the genuine enemies of a rational and just America and work together to make sure that we live up to the ideals enshrined in founding documents. That we sincerely and diligently work to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
Because if this campaign has proven anything, it has proven that the country needs at least one political party that is steadfast and unshakable in its conviction that all men are created equal. It needs one party to be the party that does not take our prejudices as a given, but takes it as a given that we can, we must, and we will do better in the future.
