Budowsky: In 2016, Sanders soared, Clinton sunk, Trump won, truth lost

For many Americans, 2016 was Dickensian, though my dark and foreboding words today will conclude with a hopeful ending that documents how powerfully Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) still dominates President-elect Donald Trump in public approval, which should inspire all progressives and be widely reported by all major media.

2016 began as the best of times, when the mainstream media blackout against Bernie Sanders ended and the progressive champion ignited a political brushfire that inspired millions to action, and ended as the worst of times, with Trump promising to use the power of the presidency to begin a new nuclear arms race while continuing to lie about the election result by claiming he won a landslide — after losing the popular vote to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million.

2016 will go down in history as the first time a Russian dictator ever played a major role in electing a Republican candidate, aggressively supporting Trump through espionage, covert action and disinformation.

{mosads}Some Republicans condemned this while others, including the president-elect, publicly or secretly cheered.

While Vladimir Putin waged a war against liberal democracy throughout the United States and Europe, covertly supporting Trump and far-right European parties in multiple nations, President Obama appeared to be asleep at the switch, doing nothing effective to stop Putin and continuing to keep secret from Americans the full details of Russian treachery against American democracy.

2016 will go down in history as the year when the FBI — under Director James Comey — for the first time since the days of J. Edgar Hoover intervened in a presidential campaign.

Comey’s efforts dramatically helped one candidate: Trump.

Clinton was defeated by three factors.

1. The Russian espionage a Democratic president failed to protect us from, the results of which dominated the news for the last three months of the campaign.
2. Comey’s unprecedented and unethical intervention, which dominated the news for the last two weeks of the campaign.
3. The Clinton campaign’s incompetence and the candidate’s own weaknesses, which I warned about in columns throughout the campaign.

Historians will remember 2016 as the year in which the Democratic nominee was under attack from a Russian dictator and an FBI director at the same time and yet still won the popular vote by a substantial margin.

For that, she deserves far more credit than she has been given.

2016 will be remembered as the year when America elected our first post-truth president, who repeatedly and habitually makes statements that are false. In our “fake news” world, lies now receive equal standing with truth. In this Kafkaesque and surreal world, the mainstream media spent the primary season virtually campaigning for Trump and blacking out other GOP candidates for the nomination, and spent the fall serving as a megaphone for attacks against Clinton spread by Russian espionage and fake news sites.

As 2016 ends, the free press itself is under unprecedented attack by the president-elect, who implies he will seek revenge against those he adds to his ever-growing enemies list, and by the Russian dictator, who has destroyed a free press in Russia and works covertly to undermine democracy and the free press around the world.

While to many this seems Dickensian, all is not lost. The political pendulum swings. During the first term of President George W. Bush, the GOP controlled the presidency and Congress, and after the elections of 2006 and 2008, the tide turned and Democrats regained control of the presidency, the Senate and the House.

While Trump names a Cabinet of millionaires and billionaires, battles for tax cuts for the most wealthy, denies egregious conflicts of interest that are obvious to most observers, and glorifies in the extravagance of his alleged wealth, Pope Francis observed Christmas by warning of the dangers of materialism and praying for the well-being of the poor.

We shall see how working-class voters in key electoral vote states react to the president-elect nominating as secretary of Labor a fast-food executive who is hostile to the interests of workers Trump pretended to champion during the campaign, and how they react as they learn that Trump’s pretensions of populism during the campaign were, in fact, a fraud.

Sen. Ted Kennedy (Mass.), one of the great Democratic icons of our age, once said that “sometimes a party must sail against the wind.” The irony as 2016 closes is that in terms of public opinion, despite GOP control in Washington today, the voters are still with the Democrats on major issues.

It is true that Clinton won a significant popular vote victory and that Sanders bested Donald Trump in match-up polling throughout the campaign, usually by true landslide margins of 10 to 20 percentage points. And it is true that Sanders remains the most popular leader in American politics today, continuing to have far higher popularity than Trump could dare to dream of.

According to the latest HuffPost Pollster summary of polling, as of Christmas Day, Trump’s ratings were 48.6 percent unfavorable and 43.8 precent favorable, making him one of the most unpopular president-elects in history.

By dramatic contrast, Sanders’s ratings remain in the stratosphere, at 53.9 percent favorable and only 32.7 percent unfavorable, leaving Sanders towering some 25 points ahead of Trump in favorable/unfavorable ratios.

As 2016 ends and 2017 begins, Democrats who sail against the wind in Washington should feel empowered by the fact that Sen. Sanders’s huge popularity lead over President-elect Trump augurs well for the progressive majority waiting to be born in coming elections.

Brent Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas) and former Chief Deputy Majority Whip Bill Alexander (D-Ark.). He holds an LL.M. degree in international financial law from the London School of Economics. Contact him at brentbbi@webtv.net.

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