Bernie Sanders appears poised for a runaway victory in the Vermont presidential primary on Tuesday, an extraordinary outcome in an extraordinary year during which he has mounted a serious and substantive challenge to the front-runner, Hillary Clinton. This paper, nevertheless, endorses Clinton for president.

This endorsement rests on Clinton’s breadth of experience and her proven commitment to those many issues where she shares a progressive outlook with Sanders. The very notion of political experience has taken on a negative connotation in this surprising year because voters associate it with compromise and corruption. But outsider status, which Sanders has always enjoyed, does not automatically confer wisdom or ability. Clinton’s experience as a hard-working, policy-oriented senator and a secretary of state who restored the good name of the United States weighs heavily in her favor.

The contest between Clinton and Sanders has been framed as a choice between pragmatism and idealism, between incrementalism and boldness. Framing it that way oversells what Sanders offers. Fighting for health care reform, as Clinton has done for a quarter century, has been an exercise in idealism. It has been a long, difficult fight against powerful entrenched interests. The Clinton administration didn’t succeed in the 1990s. The Obama administration has made significant progress, and Clinton is right to underscore the importance of that victory.

It’s easy to hold out the promise of grand solutions. On Sanders’ part these would include a Medicare-for-all, single-payer health care system and free college for everybody. These are lofty and worthy goals; Medicare-for-all was Ted Kennedy’s idea. But Clinton is willing to be square with the American people in acknowledging that getting to those goals would be a step-by-step process, requiring the kind of painstaking work she did as a senator.

If it is Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton in the General Election, Latinos will play a decisive role and Trump will lose


Before I get into the crux of this article, I want to provide some background that I think will make a lot of things clear about why Trump has done some of the things he has done. After his comments back in the 2004-2005 time-frame that the Iraq war was a disaster, I thought he might run for President as a Democrat. Back then, Trump was a moderate who, in my opinion, could have chosen to run for either party.

The first mistake Trump made in trying to run for President was to decide to run as a Republican. I can imagine some of the reasons why and discussions had by his team as that decision was made, but that's mostly supposition on my part and immaterial. The result of deciding to run as a Republican meant that he had to try to appeal to Republican grassroots.

That would have posed a serious problem for any political team trying to solve the obstacles in his way to getting the nomination. As Trump's GOP primary opponents have said, he had expressed support for many Liberal positions in the past. If he reversed positions on those things he would immediately be seen as non-genuine and a hypocrite. Those perceptions are the exact opposite of those that team Trump was trying to create. His teams goals were to develop positions that Trump could adopt that would both signal to Conservative grass roots that he was one of them and deserved their support and would also not conflict with anything he had said previously.

It was clear to me with the birther position Trump took back during the run-up to the 2012 primary that this was a first attempt to reintroduce himself to Conservative grassroots as someone they should consider supporting. See my article on that here: TRUMP'S BIRTHER STRATEGY MAKES SENSE IF YOU UNDERSTAND ITS PURPOSE

The second position that Trump's team had him adopt was that of being radically against undocumented immigrants having a path to citizenship, and the creation of the wall on the border with Mexico.

Film director Spike Lee and his wife Tonya Lewis Lee disagee about who should be President next. Spike has made a radio commercial for Bernie Sanders in South Carolina. The endorsement is meant to counter Hillary Clinton’s excellent TV commercial narrated by Morgan Freeman. They each want the black vote. Spike says Bernie takes no money from corporations “nada” and marched with Martin Luther King. (Do you know many people marched with Martin Luther King, by the way? It’s like saying you went to Woodstock.)
http://www.showbiz411.com/2016/02/23/spike-lee-endorses-bernie-sanders-the-system-is-rigged-he-will-do-the-right-thing