Update on Project Dad: not going well

[Bucky]

I decided I would try to convince my dad, my hero, to switch his support from Clinton to Sanders.

A little background. I'm 52, dad just turned 80, but he's a very healthy & engaged 80... no major health concerns that aren't being treated, very active w/ gardening & traveling, a perfectly managed retirement. He was for Clinton over Obama in '08 (I was for Biden, then switched to Obama). We're both yelladog liberal Democrats in Houston. Economically, he's much closer to Sanders and I'm a bit closer to Clinton's pro-capitalist approach. His main take on ending corporate funding & corruption in politics is "good idea, but don't unilaterally disarm."

Obviously the big divide between us is generational and we have different tactical analyses of how the election will go.

So, this week I decided to send my dad a link to the Young Turks video where Cenk pummels the electability argument that Clinton supporters make. Here's what I sent Dad (9 mins):

Here's what Dad sent back to me:

I like what Bernie is saying but doubt the accuracy of any polls that indicate that he could defeat the Republican nominee for President. His ideals are good but he has not been able to persuade me that his idealism is realistic

Wait... what--?

He also included [link:http://|The Political Naivety of Millennials].

But as I read Dad's link... cause frankly, I too think some of Sanders's proposals are a little too pie in the sky... I noticed something funny about that Daily Kos article. Despite the title, despite the words, it's actually a strongly pro-Sanders article. It online, and so it's, you know, prone to sarcasm a bit.

By Tom Rinaldo
Thursday Feb 18, 2016

...So in summary then, millennials are responding with their hearts, not their heads, when they flock to Bernie Sanders... Because of their inexperience and youthful emotions, they truly believe that getting all of that exciting free stuff is actually possible, despite all evidence to the contrary. Just because most of them graduated from public high schools after twelve years of public education, without incurring any personal debt in the process, or that most other advanced nations offer 16 years of tuition free public education to their citizens, is no good reason to believe that America is capable of pulling something like that off here. And our unique American system of health care would no longer be so exceptionally American if we started guarantee free health care to all of our citizens the way that other advanced democracies do.

- - - - {snip} - - - -

...When Bill Clinton was himself a mere 30 years old he became the Attorney General of Arkansas. When Hillary Clinton was herself a mere 26 years old she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal.

When Martin Luther King Jr was 26 he led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. By the time he was 28 he had helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, serving as its first president. When John Lewis was 23 he was the Chairman of The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Bobby Kennedy would be considered the equivalent to an older millennial today at 36, when he became the Attorney General of the United States and the closest Advisory to his brother the American President. Bill Gates was 20 when he co-founded Microsoft, and Steve Jobs was 21 when he co-founded Apple.

One could argue that passion got the best of all of the people mentioned above, before they could internalize what was deemed possible to achieve by the establishment of their youth. You could say the same about much of a whole generation that engaged in the struggle to end Segregation in America, to end the war in Vietnam, to move feminist concerns into the foreground of public debate, to instill environmental consciousness into a disposable society and more. Young people by and large, all too naive to understand what couldn't be accomplished. All too impatient to change the world to accept that it couldn't be done, except incrementally, through a realistic pragmatic approach.

Wow. First, I've found out my dad is Kosack. But more importantly, he's not tuned into sarcasm (DU is far too toxic an environment for him). Admittedly, this parody is played in a low key. But I don't think its points are very subtle. Dad simply missed them.

What's the takeaway then? First, Sanders is facing a serious generational problem as much as Clinton is. Dad was born in the Depression and since the age of 10 has heard nothing but Cold War scares about Communism and its unsubtle euphemism Socialism. He knows first hand and from his parents what great things the New Deal did. But he's also lived to see liberal after liberal either smeared into fact-free unpopularity by Republican lies (Obama, the Clintons, Carter, Anita Hill, Valerie Plame) or gunned down by the sick extremists who react to the lying outrages ginned up by cynical conservative politicians (King, the Kennedys, Medgar Evers).

Many liberals who support Clinton do so because they know she understands what Republican smear tactics are all about. They want to prove the smears don't work. They identify with Clinton because when they see her demonized for trying to help working class families over the last 30+ years, they've felt demonized too. They've seen everyday American decency and values ridiculed and attacked by Republicans who then have the naked temerity to cloak themselves in the insane claim to being "values voters" themselves. (But which is the truer American value? Help your neighbor and make the American Dream open to all... or hatred of gays, fear blacks, and intolerance of other religions?) Having lived under the shadow of demonization, they are afraid to hope for a Sanders type agent of change. Having spent two generations dodging the "socialist" label by ill-mannered conservatives, the thought of embracing a self avowed "socialist" is unthinkable. My dad might say "They just haven't gotten around to smearing Bernie yet. But if they excoriated a moderate like Bill Clinton, what will they do with a hard lefty like Sanders?"

Sure, it's a worry. Dad's utterly right about that. A lot of people support Sanders because they don't know much detail about what he'd do--though I suspect a lot more Trump and Rubio and especially Kasich supporters are even more uninformed of what their own candidates plan to do. They're all just as scary as the Cruz supporters who actually pine for the theocratic hellhole their man promises to plunge us all into. But we live in a democracy that functions on not much voter information. Bringing it all to light is what negative campaigns are all about. And for the vast number of Millennials who have no idea how bad actual socialism can be? They, like me, I think are voting their hopes, not their fears. I think that's a better message.

I grew up in the Cold War too; turned 26 the year the Wall came down. Why would I support a socialist for president? Well, two things. First, Bernie's not gonna get everything he wants done done. The presidency is powerful, but not omnipotent. The Congress will do some reforms... and if Sanders wins, the most needed reform (getting corporate money out of politics) will actually move forward. With Clinton, I'm sorry, it simply won't. And if Sanders wins, his more out-of-step reforms will fair quite poorly. And secondly... HE'S NOT A SOCIALIST!! He're really not that much of a risk--not in a democracy. As history demonstrates, the biggest danger to a democratic society is corruption from within. In America today, it's money. Bernie's money is clean. I don't doubt that Clinton would do a decent job if she got into the White House. I'm simply too worried that she's too connected in an outsiders' year to actually get there.

[Armstead]

1. A couple of suggested links to send to him...How he succeeded as Mayor

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511276311
Mayor of Burlington

Voted as one of America’s best mayors by U.S. News & World Report in 1987.

...He won re-election three times, defeating Democratic and Republican contenders.

Caused voter turnout to double during his tenure.

Burlington became the first city in the country to fund community-trust housing under Sanders’ leadership.

He not only balanced the city budget, but undertook ambitious downtown revitalization projects. He even helped bring in a minor-league baseball team to the town, the Vermont Reds.

He sued the town’s local cable franchise and won reduced rates for customers.

Kept a developer from turning important waterfront property into condominiums, hotels, and offices to be used only by the wealthy and affluent. Instead, it was made into housing, parks, and public space. Even today, the area still has many parks and miles of public beach and bike baths, including a science center.

Provided new firms with seed funding, and helped businesses create trade associations. He funded training programs to give women access to nontraditional jobs and even gave special attention to women wanting to become entrepreneurs.

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http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511282870
Here's an article that looks back at his experience and accomplishments as Mayor of Burlington. Shows he's a lot more flexible and results oriented than he is portrayed as....

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/us/politics/as-mayor-bernie-sanders-was-more-pragmatic-than-socialist.html

As Mayor, Bernie Sanders Was More Pragmatist Than Socialist

Now 74 and the junior senator from Vermont, Mr. Sanders sometimes cites his eight years as mayor as he seeks the Democratic nomination for president. His mayoralty was his only experience as a chief executive, and it showed him to be a leader guided more by practicality than ideology.

The mayor who was quick to condemn millionaires also imposed fiscal discipline here in this laid-back blue-collar university town of 38,000 residents. He used a budget surplus not to experiment with a socialist concept like redistributing wealth but to fix the city’s deteriorating streets. And he oversaw the revitalization of downtown, often working with big business.

Back then, the Democrats were considered the old guard, his adversaries; in many cases, Mr. Sanders aligned himself with Republicans to get things done.

“Even though he talks revolution, he’s an incrementalist,” said Richard Sugarman, a longtime friend and a professor of religion at the University of Vermont. “He knows that things will only be changed little by little, one by one. That’s why he’s been effective.”

Critics on the right said their socialist mayor gave the city a bad image, wasting time on foreign affairs, including trips to Nicaragua and the Soviet Union. At the same time, critics on the left said he compromised too much with business interests and did not go far enough in pursuing socialist ideals. Over the span of his mayoralty, the number of families living in poverty grew — to 798 in 1990 from 563 in 1980, an increase of 42 percent.

Still, he was re-elected three times, each with an increasing share of the vote. Under his watch, Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, cropped up on lists of the best places to live. U.S. News and World Report named him one of the nation’s 20 top mayors in 1987, crediting him with preserving affordable housing, holding the line on property taxes and making a serious push for home rule in a state where cities had little autonomy.

“He learned how to use the levers of local government to improve people’s lives,” said Peter Dreier, a professor of politics and public policy at Occidental College who studied Burlington during Mr. Sanders’s mayoralty.....
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