The Nuclear Option - An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton, by Danielle Muscato
February 10, 2016
Dear Hillary,
I’m a Bernie Sanders supporter. I’ve canvassed for him, I’ve phone-banked for him, I’ve even traveled six hours round-trip just to shake his hand. I once personally convinced more than 100 people to become first-time donors to him in a single 10-hour period, and I’ve donated the legal maximum of $2,700 to him myself, as well.
But, I used to root for you, Hillary. You were my candidate—until you started to blow it. And you’ve been making misstep after misstep after misstep since. I have to admit, when I saw Bernie’s New Hampshire victory speech on CNN last night, and heard him talk about your concession phone call to him, it was bittersweet for me. I could imagine you making a similar concession phone call to him in a few months as the primaries draw to a close, and I didn’t know how to feel about it.
Hillary, what happened last night in New Hampshire was a disaster for your campaign. Because New Hampshire borders Bernie’s home state of Vermont, the media will undoubtedly downplay this, but YOU should not. Bernie did not just beat you; he beat you by 22.4 points—the biggest margin by which any Democrat has beat another primary candidate in that state in the last 50 years.
It’s rare that a PR lady sits down—for free, no less—to give sincere, thought-out, long-form, unsolicited advice to the opponent of her candidate without an ulterior motive. But as someone who used to support you—and who no longer does—I feel as though I owe you an explanation… and maybe, just maybe, a chance to earn back my vote.
Hillary, here is my advice:
If you want to be the nominee, you must run the cleanest primary campaign imaginable. You must run a campaign so clean that Bernie supporters will drop their jaws at your integrity and frankness. Specifically, you must:
Dissolve your Super PACs and fund 100% of your campaign going forward with individual donations only.
Immediately release the transcripts of all of your closed-door, paid speeches to the financial sector, including your Goldman Sachs transcripts—and donate the money you made from those speeches to charity.
Immediately discontinue attacking or misrepresenting Bernie Sanders, even if you think he’s attacked you first—and do not send your family to attack him, either.
If this seems over the top, remember: You are catching up from behind on perceived integrity here.
And it’s really not over-the-top, if you think about it: Bernie is NOT using a Super PAC, Bernie has NEVER given a closed-door, paid speech to an investment bank, and Bernie supporters do NOT perceive him to be attacking you. Doing these three things would level the field between your two campaigns.
Also, take note that I said, “if you want to be the nominee.” I didn’t say if you want to be President. This is just Phase 1.
Phase 2 requires that you not only beat Bernie Sanders in the PRIMARY, but in order to win the GENERAL election, you must beat Bernie in the PRIMARY by an absolute minimum of double digits across the board. No more 0.2% margins like your win in Iowa, and certainly no more double-digit losses like in New Hampshire. I will explain the connection to the general election below.
To break this down:
Your Super PACs are costing you more in credibility than they’re worth in dollars. Bernie is not using a Super PAC, as you well know—and by your own campaign’s admission, he is out-raising you without one. If you want to come even close to competing with him on credibility—if you truly believe in campaign finance reform, and truly believe in overturning Citizens United—you must dissolve your Super PACs immediately. Bernie is living proof that you can be competitive without one, so no excuses here. He raised $5.2 million in small donations in the last 20 hours. It is possible!
The media has now found evidence that i) transcripts of your paid speeches exist and ii) you own the rights to them. If you didn’t say anything horribly damning in your speeches, the transcripts will exonerate you. If you did, the public deserves to know, and your refusal to release the transcripts just makes you look guilty anyway. Now that the issue has been raised, the transcripts are doing incalculable damage to your credibility. You must release them without delay. Further, Bernie Sanders donates the proceeds from his books and paid speeches to charity. At minimum, you need to rid yourself of the $675,000 paid to you by Goldman Sachs and donate it to charity—frankly, even if it’s just to your own nonprofit foundation.
Regardless of whether you agree with this perception or not, Bernie says he doesn’t do negative campaigning, yet you have accused him of smearing you—an accusation that literally earned you boos at the last CNN debate. Even if you find it unfair, you cannot attack Bernie Sanders, or allow your family to attack Bernie Sanders, even if you perceive him to be attacking you first. Again, it hurts you more than him and just makes you look bad, and you are the one playing catch-up here.
It is not exactly a secret that you have a credibility problem. Poll after poll shows that you rank low on trustworthiness, and that the higher a potential Democratic voter ranks “honesty” as a necessary character trait in a preferred candidate, the more they prefer Bernie Sanders to you. In the latest poll I saw, you are losing to Bernie by 85 points among voters who look for honesty in a candidate.
In fact, the main group that’s putting you ahead is the group that cares about electability—which means that as Bernie becomes more and more competitive, and especially after winning New Hampshire by such an absurd margin last night, your prime advantage is disappearing or even reversing.
This is not just hurting you in the primary. It is going to cost you the Presidency. Allow me to explain.
When you use campaign tactics such as push-polling, it means one of two things—you are using shady tactics to manipulate uninformed voters away from Bernie, or alternatively, that you are conducting “legit” research for future negative ads or attacks for use in campaign speeches. Either way, it makes you look bad.
When your team creates a smartphone app that uses game theory to instruct your supporters to caucus for Martin O’Malley for the sole purpose of costing Bernie Sanders state delegate equivalents, it looks bad.
When you send out your family to attack Bernie Sanders’ health care plan and his integrity, it looks bad. Generally on the campaign trail, families are useful for showing a candidate’s human side. Seeing your family attack Bernie is not only a shock to undecided voters for this reason, but the attacks themselves are a turn-off, and they are hurting your campaign more than his. In fact, he’s raising money from them.
It’s even worse when you attack him yourself. Few people knew much about the Commodities Futures Modernization Act before you brought it up at the last TWO debates in an attempt to smear Bernie Sanders as a hypocrite. As a result, we researched it, and immediately found out that 1) far from supporting it, Bernie was the most vocal opponent of it and only voted for it out of necessity in order to avoid a government shutdown, and 2) your own campaign’s Chief Financial Officer, Gary Gensler, wrote the CFMA—after he worked at Goldman Sachs for 18 years.
These tactics are hurting your own campaign more than they are hurting Bernie’s.
But it’s much, much worse than that, Hillary: You are destroying any chance of Bernie Sanders’ supporters voting for you in the general.
There is something you need to understand, Hillary. I don’t know if you already know this (which I think is likely) and are intentionally downplaying it for strategic reasons, or if are genuinely ignorant of it, but it’s going to come back to bite you, hard, if you do not listen carefully.
This race is not about the Democrats vs the Republicans—not to Bernie Sanders supporters. You regularly contrast yourself with Republicans as though you are already the nominee, and this does not make you look good. It comes across to many as entitled—even smug.
This is crucial to understand:
This is not a race between Democrats and Republicans, as your campaign messaging would have us believe.
This is not a race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, as the media is beginning to suggest.
No. The way Bernie Sanders supporters see it, this is a race between the 1% and the 99%.
This is a race between the corporate elite and “We the People.”
This is a race between the establishment (that’s you) and the outsiders.
It is why Donald Trump is doing so well. It is why Bernie Sanders is doing so well. And, it is why your campaign is slowly, quietly, imploding.
You cannot simultaneously say you “won’t need a tour of the White House” on your first day in office, AND say claim the label of “an outsider.” You cannot simultaneously name-drop a half-dozen establishment Democrat elected officials who endorse you, and have your two-term-President-husband give stump speeches for you, and then claim that you “don’t know” what establishment means. You cannot simultaneously call for an end to mass incarceration while opposing legalization of marijuana. You cannot simultaneously attack Bernie’s record on guns (which has earned him a lifetime D- rating from the NRA) when you were a member of the Board of Directors of the nation’s largest retail seller of guns and ammunition for six straight years. You cannot simultaneously accuse Bernie Sanders of being the “gatekeeper for progressivism” while yourself acting as the gatekeeper of feminism. You cannot simultaneously tell Anderson Cooper that you’ve been “very consistent” when you have flipped on everything from TPP, to marriage equality, to Keystone XL, to single-payer health care, to the Iraq War, to private prisons, and on, and on, and on.
If you want to win, you must stop the political doublespeak. You must stop laughing off hard questions. You must stop the hypocrisy and the underhanded tactics and the feigned ignorance.
If you do not do these things, Bernie Sanders supporters will not back you in the general,even if you get the nomination. There’s even a #BernieOrBust campaign to write him in on ballots if he is not the nominee.
Look Hillary, it’s no secret that many of Bernie’s supporters are not dyed-in-the-wool Dems. You know as well as I do that 43% of Americans are independent vs only 30% who are Democrats and 26% who are Republicans. You know as well as I do that many of Bernie’s supporters are first-time voters who have never felt that a politician actually represents their views and stands up for their interests before. Hell, a lot of Bernie supporters are even former Republicans who are so fed up with the circus that the GOP has become that they switched their party affiliation just to be able to vote for Bernie in the primary.
None of these people will support an establishment Democrat nominee. They have zero loyalty to the Democratic party.
This is where Phase 2 comes in.
If you want these people to vote for you in the general election, you can’t just beat Bernie Sanders.
If there is ANY perception by Bernie supporters that you used underhanded tactics to win the nomination, or even if your primary victory is just a close call, Bernie supporters will feel cheated. They will NOT back you in the general, and a Republican will win in November.
If you want our support in November, you are going to have to win the primary using a squeaky-clean campaign—and you are going to have to win by such a wide margin that there is NO QUESTION WHATSOEVER that you didn’t cheat. You need to win by double digits, at minimum, or you will never hear the end of it—let alone by November.
If there is ANY PERCEPTION that you have cheated, or that the race was too close for comfort, what will happen next is what I’ve titled this article: “The Nuclear Option.”
If Bernie supporters think you stole the nomination—either because you only won by a narrow margin, or because there is ANY perception of dirty pool, or both—they will not trust you even more than they already don’t trust you. Some of them MAY vote for you to keep a Republican out of office, but they will be jaded. They will not canvass for you, they will not phone bank for you, and they will not donate to you.
And you will lose.
Some Bernie supporters are preparing for this, even expecting it. I have seen more than one Bernie supporter reflect that if you are the nominee, and a Republican wins because of low Democratic morale and low voter turnout, then the DNC “deserves” four years of a Republican President and Congress.
The Nuclear Option:
Maybe that is what it will take to persuade Elizabeth Warren to run in 2020.
Maybe that is what it will take to wake America up to what a disaster the Citizens United decision was.
Maybe that is what it will take to flush out the establishment Democrats who do still think they can sell us the lie that they represent the interests of the 99% and not the interests of corporate donors.
We don’t want to use the Nuclear Option. It’s a deterrent, not a plan B.
This isn’t a threat. I am not proposing that we hold the country hostage. I am not advocating the #BernieOrBust pledge to write him in if you are the nominee.
No, I’m simply pointing out that a Republican victory is, in fact, what will happen naturally if Bernie’s supporters feel cheated, become demoralized, and stop believing that change is possible.
As so eloquently put by Robyn Morton, when you ask me to vote for you, you are asking me “to believe that the establishment on both the right and the left have so thoroughly strangled the political system that it is no longer ‘reasonable’ to even try for reform.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. The choice is yours, Hillary. You’re a good politician. You’ve done a lot of good things in your life, and you have the experience and knowledge—the potential!—to be a great president. But We the People do not trust you. And we will not vote for someone we do not trust—we’ll just stay home.
It’s not a threat. It’s just a fact.
And if you want to change that, you’re going to have to earn our trust—or in my case, earn it back.
As Bernie himself said in his speech last night, when voters are enthusiastic, energized, and engaged, Democrats win. When voters are demoralized, and voter turnout is low, Republicans win.
Start by dissolving your Super PACs, releasing your transcripts, and discontinuing your attacks. Then we can have a good, clean campaign, and who knows—you might just make it to Philadelphia.
Respectfully,
Danielle Muscato
and all Bernie Or Bust ers
