Jack Dugan
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The delegate count for the Democratic primaries has former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leading at 2,228 delegates (including unpledged Super Delegates), just 155 shy of securing the nomination, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders trailing at 1,454 delegates.
Sanders shows no signs of slowing down and, given that the majority of Clinton’s lead over him is tallied as party heavyweight Super Delegates, he should take his momentum straight to the Democratic National Convention, if not further.
But as popular and impressive that the Sanders campaign has been leading up to now, it remains that Clinton is moments from securing the Democratic nomination. Arguably, what has gotten her this far with such progressive opposition by Sanders is a methodic shift of her campaign rhetoric to the left.
While Sanders pushes for the prospect of single-payer universal health care, she vehemently argues for a steady reformation of Obamacare. While Sanders has, famously now, stated that climate change is the biggest threat to national security, positioning environmental issues as some of the most important on his agenda, Clinton has released prospective environmental policy that would work as a much needed spark in a transition from dirty coal- based American energy to cleaner, renewable sources of energy. The Huffington Post reported on the matter in November 2015, “In a slight shift from Clinton’s 2008 campaign, which tried to help coal companies stay afloat by throwing incentives at them to clean up production, the new proposal heavily pushes coal communities away from the industry that has dominated their economy for roughly a century.”
Clinton has been consistently pulled to make more progressive claims by the popularity of the truly progressive opposition of Sanders, and now that her campaign sees him as little threat to their presidential bid, we’re going to see a steady shift back to her true colors as a wolf in a progressive clothing. Most recent evidence of this is seen with the coal industry she was so ready to push toward cleaner, more viable sources of energy.
In a town-hall-style forum early this month in West Virginia, after being confronted on how she plans on directing the coal industry, she did all but entirely retract such a plan with a single response: “We’ve got to do a lot more on carbon capture and sequestration and try to see how we get coal to be a fuel that can be continued to be sold and continued to be mined.”
The continuation of mining and profiting from coal is entirely contrary to the prospect of a renewable-based-energy economy. The idea of sustainability is one that has been contorted and twisted to fit whatever rhetoric puts ballots in the box, but dirty energy such as coal is simply not renewable in the most basic sense of the term.
What Clinton has stated months ago is no longer a concern to her. She is a mere 155 delegates shy of the nomination and no longer needs to pander to progressives. Just as husband President Bill Clinton charmed the youth vote with ambiguous claims of marijuana use and saxophone solos, only to march straight into the Oval Office and institute economic policy as neo-liberal as Reagan’s, we will see a steady and deliberate reversion from the quasi-progressive Hillary Clinton we’ve come to know throughout the primaries thus far to the true fiscally inclined politician she is. If and when she secures the nomination, a long history of deception and nepotism will live on in American politics.