Daniel Henninger:Bernie Loves Hillary Bernie Sanders isn’t going to be the Democratic party’s nominee, but he represents its future.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-loves-hillary-1444861871
The Democratic presidential nomination was fun while it lasted.
It ended late on Oct. 13 with Bernie Sanders’s incredible dismissal of Hillary Clinton’s email quagmire. The smile that illuminated Hillary’s face as Bernie folded actually looked genuine. She accepted Bernie’s political pardon with a handshake and an effusive, “Thank you, Bernie, thank you.”
In normal political competition, you don’t blow off your opponent’s main vulnerability, in Hillary’s case, her credibility. Notwithstanding an official FBI investigation, that problem looks to be behind her now, at least with unsettled Democrats.
From wherever Joe Biden was sitting Tuesday, the hill to the presidency just got steeper, because Democratic donors from New York to Hollywood were concluding that she’s going to be all right. A residual minority of progressives will stick with Sen. Sanders through the primaries, but an American politician preaching “revolution” won’t win a presidential nomination.
These staged debates do poorly at revealing who could be a competent U.S. president. See “Debates, 2007-08.” But they are useful at surfacing the ideas that define either party. Here is what we learned about the Democrats.
On foreign policy, it is now the party of U.S. isolationism.
That this is true was made clear two days before the debate in Barack Obama’s “60 Minutes” interview Sunday. Pressed by Steve Kroft on whether he would intervene as U.S. influence in the Middle East was being displaced by Russia and Iran, Mr. Obama repeatedly demurred.
When Mr. Kroft asked if the world was a safer place, Mr. Obama answered: “America is a safer place.” The idea that the world can spin to pieces if the American landmass remains nominally safe was the view of the isolationist wing of the Republicans in 1940. Now the Democrats own it. Or as Mr. Sanders made clear in the debate: Hell no, he won’t go in a world of “quagmires.”
Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee mainly outbid each other’s commitments to going nowhere. Mr. Chafee did mention Vietnam, which Mr. Sanders knows is the origin of Barack Obama’s withdrawal of his party from a lead role in the world’s affairs.
The essential statement came from Hillary Clinton, on Libya in 2011: “Our response, which I think was smart power at its best, is that the United States will not lead this.”
Former Sen. Jim Webb stood on the stage as the unwelcome ghost of Democrats past—senators like Moynihan, Lieberman, Nunn, Glenn, Boren, Jackson and Mansfield. That’s all gone. The price for making isolation America’s foreign policy again may be paid in the next 15 months.
By the way, with the explicit opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership by Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders, the party is abandoning a free-trade commitment dating back to FDR and the Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1934. This is not your father’s Democratic Party.
Most evident from Mr. Sanders and the leftward-running Mrs. Clinton in this debate is how completely the Democratic Party’s politics have devolved into nonstop moralistic ranting about the domestic economy. It is bleeding into demagoguery.
Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and of course Hillary Clinton have committed the party to a course of individual legal retribution long demanded by the party’s left. Mrs. Clinton: “My plan would have the potential of actually sending the executives to jail.”
These candidates’ nonstop holier-than-thou-ism is in fact a feint. Its purpose is to conceal the reality of seven years of economic under-performance during the Obama presidency. The labor-force participation rate, at 62.4, is where it was in 1977. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own vocabulary describes the real world out there: discouraged workers, employed part time, not currently looking for work.
With chutzpah one has to admire, the party that in two terms weakened, if not wrecked, the economy, now presents itself as its savior.
What is striking about the candidates’ economic proposals is how disconnected they are from a private-sector economy. The Democrats have disappeared into a sealed world of public-sector economics, running the spectrum from prescriptive mandates, like the $15 minimum wage (a $10 min-wage commitment destroyed Wal-Mart’s earnings this week), to wishful thinking, like Bernie Sanders’s “tuition-free” public-college education. In Mrs. Clinton’s version, college would be “debt-free.”
CNN’s uncurious Anderson Cooper didn’t ask the senator how it could be “free.” But Mr. Sanders answered it himself: “I pay for my program, by the way, through a tax on Wall Street speculation.”
It is so fantastic. The Democrats, not least Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, seem to have discovered El Dorado itself in “Wall Street,” a city of infinite gold dust to finance their economic pyramids in perpetuity.
Bernie Sanders may not become the nominee, but the Vermont socialist represents the logical ending point of the modern Democratic Party’s belief system: It’s all free!
But can Hillary win? Of course. See, “Republicans, circular firing squad, 2015-16.”
Write to henninger@wsj.com
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