London reviews a book entitled Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. The book reveals how the capitalist ruling class's fake version of democracy actually worked during the primaries when confronted with a candidate that feigned a social democratic (not a "socialist) political platform.
Shattered conveys the sense of genuine concern in the Clinton campaign following each major Sanders victory, especially the New Hampshire primary in February and the Michigan primary in March. After each defeat, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party were confronted by their own unpopularity and by a groundswell of opposition from working class voters and youth.In the second part of this two part series entitled "The Democratic Convention, anti-Russian hysteria, and Clinton’s concession" the book reveals the juicy details of how the Democratic party operatives and the Sanders camp colluded to keep a lid on a potential explosive reaction by Sanders' supporters at the Democratic convention.
“We should have figured out a way to deal with Bernie earlier,” Clinton told her staff after losing the New Hampshire primary. A debate emerged within the campaign, with one side, led by Bill Clinton, arguing that the campaign was ignoring questions of social inequality and would drive working class voters away.
The overwhelming majority of Clinton strategists and Democratic Party operatives ignored Bill Clinton’s proposals. ....
The decision to focus more intently on identity politics was taken to allow Clinton to build a voting base centered among wealthier voters, so as to ensure that she would not be obligated to issue any proposals for social reform that might turn off her backers in the financial aristocracy and the wealthiest 10 percent of the population.
After the convention Democratic operatives focused on a script to defeat Trump which they have continued ever since Clinton's defeat.
... they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.” In the days that followed, “her team coalesced around the idea that Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign, overshadowed by the contents of stolen e-mails and Hillary’s own private server imbroglio.”
The anti-Russia narrative did not emerge out of Clinton’s head simply as a defensive cover for her own electoral catastrophe. Working with her allies from the State Department and the military-intelligence apparatus, a powerful section of the American ruling class elevated Russia’s alleged role as a mechanism to tamper social opposition, taint broad anti-Trump sentiment with the poison of American nationalism, and advance the anti-Russian agenda of US imperialism.
This narrative has been become the Democratic Party’s sole method for opposing Trump in his first months of office.
