Well, this is weird. But hey, it’s a weird election year. Due to a deadline that didn’t cooperate with this week’s big political news, I’m writing to you from the day before the Democratic contests in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, and South Dakota. By the time you read this, the voting will be over in those states and Hillary Clinton will have the delegates needed to become the first woman to win the presidential nomination of any major United States political party in—to borrow Ru Paul’s preferred term—herstory.
Before anyone accuses me of having rigged time itself in order to declare Clinton the victor of this year’s left-dividing Democratic contest, let me just point out that even as I type this, the Associated Press, based on its own canvassing of delegates and superdelegates, has already declared Clinton the winner of the Democratic nomination battle. According to the AP, as of the day before this week’s primaries, Clinton had already reached the magic number: 2,383 delegates pledging to vote for her at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in late July. Barring the collapse of math as we know it, it’s over.
Sorry, Bernie Sanders fans (and fanatics). He ran a strong and righteous campaign, but Clinton has beaten Sanders fair and square in the popular vote—she was more than three million votes ahead of Sanders before Tuesday’s primaries—and no matter what you think of the role that superdelegates play in the Democratic nominating process, under the terms of that process, she’s beaten him fair and square in the race to cobble together 2,383 pledged delegates and superdelegates—just as Barack Obama cobbled together enough pledged delegates and superdelegates to defeat Clinton at roughly this stage in 2008.
Sure, you can say it’s not final until July 25 when the superdelegates actually vote. Maybe Sanders himself will keep on saying that until the convention, who knows. But there’s an urgency in seeing reality now.
The Republican nominee for president is a bullying, sexist, and baldly racist reality television star who places the rule of law far beneath his own astoundingly narcissistic needs and his frightening proto-fascist demands. Aside from being a terrifying development, this means that this year’s presidential contest is about something much more fundamental than American liberalism versus American conservatism.
It’s about whether we will elect a president who believes in American democracy. After four decades in politics, there is of course a lot one can say about Clinton, and sure, a fair bit of it is negative. Even so, one can’t seriously doubt that Clinton understands the Constitution, believes in the 14th Amendment, and respects the rule of law. When it comes to Donald Trump, one can’t seriously argue that he understands, believes in, or respects any of those things—or anything at all, save for his own egotism and will to power.
Most recently, Trump has been on a tear against a federal judge who is presiding over a case against the now-defunct and highly questionable “Trump University.” Trump claims the judge—who was born in the United States—is Mexican and therefore out to get him. Trump has also suggested that a Muslim judge couldn’t impartially oversee a case involving him, either. Republican senator Lindsey Graham described these blatantly bigoted claims from Trump as “the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy.” Graham continued: “There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.”
Graham was speaking to members of his own party with that last line, but this idea should also be heard by any Bernie-or-Bust dead-enders. You don’t have to love everything—or even most things—about this deeply troubled country in order to know that in a fight for the American presidency between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, it’s essential to fight for Clinton. 
How can you call her left? Special interests are very risky for dems. Even if you agree with the agenda, it’s suspect.
Yo, is this sexist? I would vote vote for Hillary if she was more mom-like. “No fighting. Watch that tone, young man. Nobody is really going to kill you. War is bad.” But she’s not.
Every smug and self-satisfied screech to support Hillary makes me feel better about throwing my vote away to a fringe Maoist or Trotskyist. The Tea-Baggers ran the GOP further into lunacy by bravely embracing the reactionaries and forcing their party to follow them. Hillary and her panicked supporters encourage us to abandon the left entirely and become the moderate Republicans of twenty years past. Sanders made an attempt to stop the drift to the right (misguided as it may have been) and you are cackling over his body in smug satisfaction in a race to follow the moderate Republicans as they race to the place occupied by Tea Baggers, who rushes to occupy the space left behind by the Know-Nothings and the Klan.
Go ahead and join their procession to the right. You’ll always lose until the youth you mock and try to break stands up for itself. To paraphrase Lenin paraphrasing Engels:
“is it not natural that youth should predominate in our Party, the revolutionary party? We are the party of the future, and the future belongs to the youth. We are a party of innovators, and it is always the youth that most eagerly follows the innovators. We are a party that is waging a self-sacrificing struggle against the old rottenness, and youth is always the first to undertake a self-sacrificing struggle.
“No, let us leave it to the establishment to collect the ‘tired’ old men of thirty, revolutionaries who have ‘grown wise’, and renegades from Social-Democracy. We shall, always be a party of the youth of the advanced class!”
It’s like you’re trying to drill this “fair and square” bullshit into our collective mind. It’s not gonna work bc people are smart and research their shit and know that Hillary beating Bernie was the furthest thing from a democratic election. It’s all a bunch of bull shit, just like your article. And just like the idea of voting for Hillary to stop Trump. It’s not over yet. But if either Hillary or Trump become president our country will be equally fucked. There is no lesser evil between them.
Yup the writer is just as brainwashed as any Trump supporter. Hillary is a warmonger and absolutely celebrates the very antithesis of democracy. She has blood on her hands for her actions in Honduras, Afghanistan, Lybia, Iraq and Syria. She has money in her pocket from the rape of Main street by Wallstreet. You are a fool for believing that her having a vagina makes her a hero. She is a disgrace to all Americans, ESPECIALLY women. And you are a disgrace to journalists everywhere (especially the ones who have been hunted down and murdered under her personally appointed fascist regimes) for writing this piece.