Who would be most able to work with Republicans, Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton?
Sanders enthusiasts are cherrypicking the data. A recent, rigorously nonpartisan study of Congressional partisanship ranked Bernie Sanders as the single most partisan member of the Senate in 2015, edging out Ted Cruz for the bottom spot.Sanders, Cruz top list of most partisan senators And compiling lifetime scores of 227 Senators placed Sanders at 11th from the bottom--so he's been a dedicated partisan all along.The Lugar Center From the same lifetime rankin Senator Clinton ranked 71st from the bottom--more partisan than average but vastly better than Sanders. And Senator Obama ranked 67th from the bottom, FWIW. So while neither Democratic contender is going to become a Kumbaya Moment President hand in hand with a Republican-dominated Congress, as it's guaranteed to be, getting a handful of Republican Senators on board with a Supreme Court nomination could make an enormous difference in the long run--and that's very unlikely to happen with Sanders.Remember, most of these Senators know both Clinton and Sanders personally, so the Republican propaganda onslaught against Clinton won't have the same effect on them as it has on credulous Republican voters who have never met her--and in most cases who refuse to even watch her in a conversation on TV, or in a debate.That's the cruel beauty of Republican propaganda: its goal is to fill its patsies with so much fear and hatred that they're literally unable to listen to anything that propaganda's target says. Sanders has been spared this onslaught because the GOP's leadership desperately wants him to be the Democratic nominee. Don't help them. Make sure everyone you know knows that if Clinton wins the Democratic nomination you'll vote for her and urge others to as well.A note on divisiveness: People are often accused of "being divisive" not because they've done anything divisive, but because people's hostility towards them has been ginned up by well-financed propaganda campaigns. The first black couple to buy a home in a Chicago suburb, back in the 1960s, was arrested for "incitement to riot" because white racist neighbors rioted against them. That's the sense in which Clinton and Obama have been labeled "divisive."
Between right and left, conservative and liberal, is a THIRD way really possible according to you? Would you vote for such a candidate and what would according to you be a good compromise in term of economy, immigration, healthcares, etc?
Between left and right? What left, and what right? Right now, politics in the US is a team sport. It’s about winning.What passes for “left” in the US is centrist in the rest of the world.We have several polarities right now, that get identified as left or right.The first, and foremost, is the right to an abortion. And that is a battle between religious conviction, on which it appears there can be no compromise, and respect for the inviolability and self-ownership of a woman’s body, which, also, leaves little room for compromise. As long as you have one side calling it murder, and the other side calling it slavery, there is no middle ground. The fundamental litmus test for a presidential candidate is falling on the right side of this divide.Next, not to put too fine a point on it, is white people versus everyone else. Debates about immigration, healthcare, the economy, trade, they ultimately all boil down to this. Brown and black people being fed up with getting shit on, and white people afraid of losing their special status.Finally, the most important one, and the one that remains most hidden, is the 0.1% against everyone else. And the 0.1% do a great job of focusing attention on the first two.Think about this: in the 1950s, that time when America was supposedly great, the top marginal income tax rate was 91%. Why aren’t all those #MAGA trumpistas calling for a return to those tax rates, eh?The kind of candidate I would really get behind, left, right, center, is one that is committed to getting money out of politics, and one that is committed to popping the ideological bubbles that have developed, both in broadcast media and in social media.