Why Hillary Clinton should offer Bernie Sanders voters some goodies

Bernie Sanders did a bit better than expected in Tuesday's Northeastern primaries, managing to win Rhode Island despite trailing in pre-election polls. Still, he was soundly thumped in Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, and lost narrowly in Connecticut.

Given that Sanders needed to win all these primaries to make a dent in Clinton's delegate lead, this election is all but wrapped up. Clinton will almost certainly go into the convention with a majority of pledged delegates, and already had the vast majority of superdelegate support. Barring a gigantic upheaval, Clinton will be the nominee.

I have previously argued that Bernie Sanders should demand some concessions in return for his support. But it's worth looking at that argument from the other end of the telescope. In a strictly mercenary sense, there is a strong argument for Clinton herself to make some concessions to woo Sanders voters.

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Now, Clinton supporters — and the candidate herself, as Greg Sargent demonstrates — argue that this is unfair. In 2008, after the primary campaign against Barack Obama, Clinton did not try to extract some big policy promises. Instead, after exhausting every possible avenue towards victory, she got behind him, and gave him a strong endorsement during the Democratic primary.

This is basically true, but it's also misleading. Clinton made no demands in 2008 because there were no demands to be made. She and Obama were within angstroms policy-wise. The major disputes centered first on quite vicious mud-slinging and race-baiting, second on Clinton's vote for the Iraq War, and third on whether a market-based health care reform plan should have an individual mandate. Obama, in what looks in retrospect to be deliberate deception, insisted that an individual mandate was not required, while Clinton disagreed.

In other words, the 2008 primary was between two moderate liberals with few real disagreements — best evidenced by what happened after the election, when Obama stuck Clinton's individual mandate in ObamaCare, and gave her the top foreign policy position in his administration.

By contrast, this primary has featured enormous substantive disagreements. Sanders — a self-identified socialist, something that would have been totally anathema in 2008 — argues for Nordic-style social insurance for health care and paid leave, free state college tuition, plus a big boost in Social Security and a huge new infrastructure package (in addition to various other goodies). On this score, Clinton is either mildly supportive (paid leave), much less aggressive (infrastructure), or in complete disagreement (health care).

More fundamentally, Sanders has pushed an utterly different political ideology than typical Democratic Party stuff. He constantly rails against a morally bankrupt political establishment that has been captured by extreme wealth, and therefore unable to seriously reckon with the problems faced by ordinary people. He wasn't even a Democrat until the presidential race. His speeches are mostly a laundry list of obscene wealth statistics and policy programs, mainly interesting because they are perfectly pitched to the political moment. Though surely ambition plays some role in his presidential run, he's a candidate of advancing ideas to a very unusual degree — and it has worked well against long odds, particularly among young people.

Clinton is a basically a status quo politician, content with holding the line against Republican advances and maybe fiddling around the policy margins here and there. There's not much reason for Sanders voters to believe that she is actually interested in their priorities.

The Obama coalition was basically minorities and young people, but the major demographic split during this primary has been age. Clinton has won black Americans by resounding margins, Latinos by quite a bit less, but has been repeatedly obliterated among young people. She needs those young people to turn out, particularly if she wants to win the kind of spectacular landslide that might actually flip the House of Representatives.

So it only makes sense for Clinton to make a few notable policy concessions to demonstrate at least a modicum of good faith to Sanders voters. As it stands, judging by her campaign's conservative — and flagrantly dishonest — attacks on universal single-payer health care, I predict she would actually veto such a program should it reach her desk as president.

If Hillary Clinton wants leftist support, the least she can do is clarify that she is not an active opponent of their ideas, by signing on to a few big ones like infrastructure, free college, or a strong public option for ObamaCare. In return, of course, Sanders ought to grant his endorsement. Given the extreme unlikelihood of such programs coming to a vote in the near future, it's not a tough call.