With a Trump threat looming, the left gets behind Clinton

By David Weigel

PHILADELPHIA — On Saturday morning, shortly before Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) was introduced to his last Iowa audience of the campaign, an Iowa State organizer named Kaleb Vanfosson stepped up to the microphone. He started talking about student loan debt and how “full-time bigot Donald Trump” had no plan to alleviate it. Then he argued that Hillary Clinton had no plan, either.

“She is so trapped in the world of the elite that she has completely lost a grip on what it’s like to be an average person,” he said as a campaign worker appeared to direct him to an exit. “She doesn’t care. Voting for another 'the lesser of two evils,' there’s no point.”

The moment, which went a little viral, was jarring not because it represented a trend; it was jarring because it didn’t. After the most ideologically fraught Democratic primary since at least the 1980s, and after a convention that saw multiple walkouts by some Sanders delegates, Clinton appears to have less of a challenge on her left flank than Al Gore did in 2000; final polls show her enjoying party loyalty comparable to that of Barack Obama in his two campaigns.

In left-wing and socialist publications, there have been cases for Clinton and arguments about protest voting, but little of the “two evils” nihilism that marked 2000. The Nation, a source of support for Ralph Nader that year, has repeatedly endorsed Clinton, arguing in its latest editorial that the Democratic nominee “now stands with progressives” on key issues and that on “criminal justice and trade policy, she’s moved left even when that involved renouncing her husband’s legacy.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/07/with-a-trump-threat-looming-the-left-gets-behind-clinton/?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1