Clinton Won the Battle, Sanders the War Hillary is living in Bernie’s party. So she backs free college and a ‘public option’ while jettisoning trade and charter schools. Juan Williams
http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-won-the-battle-sanders-the-war-1469395517
Bill Clinton took Democrats to the political middle. He met with Republicans to pass welfare-to-work laws and put more police on the streets. Barack Obama steered the party leftward with “change we can believe in.” He promised to end long-running wars, deliver an economic recovery, offer medical coverage to the uninsured and unify an increasingly diverse nation.
Hillary Clinton will claim the Democratic nomination this week in Philadelphia, but the party is no longer defined by its standard-bearer. The energy rests instead with a rising generation of Democrats excited to use activist government to protect them in anxious economic times.
Older Democrats and minority voters provided a “firewall” that allowed Mrs. Clinton to defeat her rival in the primaries, Sen. Bernie Sanders. Democrats who call themselves “somewhat liberal” went for Hillary by 13 percentage points, according to exit poll data analyzed by Public Opinion Strategies. “Moderates” backed her by 23 percentage points. But among the quarter of Democrats who see themselves as “very liberal,” she ran even with the socialist.
Bernie Sanders and his activist supporters have moved Mrs. Clinton and the party’s platform to the left. The result is that the Democrats have taken on an identity that comes from a new base: voters under 40 who have no problem with Mr. Sanders’s socialist vision. A 2015 study by the Pew Research Center found that 51% of millennials “identify as Democrats or lean Democratic,” compared with only 35% for Republicans. Two-fifths of millennials are people of color and immigrants.
This is not your father’s—or even your older sister’s—Democratic Party. It is far more left-leaning than under Bill Clinton or President Obama.
Almost 60% of Democratic voters agree that “socialism has a positive” impact on society, according to a February poll by OnMessage Inc. and the American Action Network. In Iowa 43% of Democrats said in January that they would use the word “socialist” to describe themselves, a survey by the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg Politics found.
Forty-seven percent of Democrats told Gallup last year that they are both “socially liberal and economically moderate/liberal”—the highest level in the poll’s history. In 2001 only 30% of Democrats described themselves that way. Between 2000 and 2015 the percentage of “Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters” who consider themselves liberal has gone up to 42% from 27%, according to a Pew study in February.
Mrs. Clinton has been running to the front of this liberal parade. This month she wrapped her arms around one of Mr. Sanders’s biggest causes by backing tuition-free college at in-state public universities for families making under $125,000 a year.
She broke with Mr. Obama by calling for repeal of the so-called Cadillac tax on health-insurance plans, a priority for labor unions. She gave a sop to the teachers unions by backtracking on her decades-old support for charter schools. It is clear that in this new liberal order of Democratic politics, the unions will be the enforcers. CONTINUE AT SITE
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