Elections often involve choosing the "lesser evil," but has there ever been a choice of evils like Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?
Whereas no one (with good reason) saw Trump coming on the Republican side, just about everyone predicted Hillary on the Democratic.
Bernie Sanders supporters who think the "fix was in" for Hillary exaggerate (she leads him, after all, by more than three million votes) but are on to something nonetheless: Their man never had a chance, in part because of that Democratic super-delegate angle (how the GOP wishes at this point that they'd gone that route as well). It has been amusing to watch Bernie win states, sometimes by double digits, only to fall further behind in delegates.
Sanders is sticking around but was always more nuisance than real threat. That he has won 20 primaries/caucuses is less a testament to him than to both the economic illiteracy of his supporters (socialism, really?) and Hillary's enduring weaknesses as a candidate; indeed, it is difficult to remember a case where a party's presumptive nominee seems to inspire so many yawns and "could do worse" rationalizations among the rank and file.
When you are best known for HillaryCare, cattle-future profits, Whitewater, Travelgate, suppressing "bimbo eruptions," lost billing records, renting out the Lincoln bedroom, and Benghazi it becomes hard to generate much excitement on your behalf--reminding voters that she is a woman is about all she has.
Still, Hillary benefited in the end from both a pervasive sense of inevitability and an extraordinarily weak Democratic bench due to the down-ballot damage Barack Obama has done to his party since 2008.
It is easy to forget, largely because they were so forgettable, that, apart from Bernie, Hillary's only competition at the outset consisted of Martin O'Malley, who got wiped out for insisting that "all lives matter" (remember, these are Democrats we're talking about here), Jim Webb, who should be a Republican, and the pointless Lincoln Chafee, who used to be one.
When your only options after those are a 74-year-old socialist crank from Ben & Jerry land and Obama's "impeachment insurance" (Joe Biden), you have no choice but to ride it out, hope the GOP does what it does best (self-destruct), and pray that Obama squashes any FBI referral on those pesky emails (as so often with matters Hillary, integrity becomes a quick casualty of the pursuit of power).
Last, however, and often missed when explaining Democratic politics these days is the way in which Hillary's victory was aided by the increasing ideological cohesion and overall unity of purpose of the Democratic Party.
Back when Will Rogers said "I don't belong to an organized political party, I'm a Democrat," the Democratic Party consisted of an inchoate hodgepodge of special-interest groups united by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Indeed, FDR's coalition featured such an unlikely array of bed partners--Northern ethnics, Southern (pro-segregation) whites, Northern blacks, etc.--that it was bound to eventually dissolve under the stress of its contradictions.
The "coalition of the ascendant" cobbled together by Obama is, in contrast, more durable because it's less contradictory in terms of both ideology and interests.
Turnout levels will be crucial and potentially problematic (it will, after all, be Hillary, not Obama, at the top of the ticket) but it is almost inconceivable that the crucial elements of that new Democratic coalition--blacks, Hispanics, gays, and single women--would consider bolting the Democrats for the Republicans. The congruity of interests is simply too great, and becomes even more so as Trump and Trumpism take over the GOP.
Black voters, in particular, have been the ultimate deciders in the Hillary-Bernie match-up, with the wife of "our first black president" doing well in direct proportion to the percentage of the black vote in a given primary.
Not only is the Democratic base increasingly united and cohesive in terms of interests, but so, too, is the Democratic Party ideologically.
While much has been made of Bernie's challenge to Hillary from the left, the truth is that the ideological space between the two was never as large as thought, and it was a relatively easy matter for her to take a few steps leftward to extinguish it (and him).
Husband Bill's "new Democrats" are long-gone and the Democratic Party now belongs to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. It consequently demonstrates a degree of ideological lockstep seldom before seen in an American political party, enforced by a social media/Twitter mob and the ever-tighter strictures of political correctness.
Bernie's ideological challenge really wasn't a challenge at all because the Democratic Party has been moving steadily for some time now toward becoming an American analog to a European social democratic party anyway.
Democrats might not be all that excited about Hillary, but there isn't a single major issue in which her position is significantly out of sync with the party base, or at least one that can't be finessed with some typical Clinton bobbing and weaving.
The Democratic establishment settled for Hillary because they see what's happening on the other side and know that if they sit tight and don't mess it up she will give them just about everything they want, including that third Obama term.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 05/16/2016