We are one week out from the biggest primary of them all in the quadrennial presidential marathon – the California Primary. And the race has been going on for so long that you have to ask – how many people are still open to changing their minds? We spend the hour with two people who’ve done some movement: The last time we Norman Solomon him on, he was making public calls for the Bernie Sanders campaign to take clearer foreign policy positions — now he’s hoping to serve as a Sanders delegate to the DNC; Tom Hayden says he’s more attracted to Bernie Sanders’ politics — but he’s decided to vote for Hillary Clinton.
Guests:
Tom Hayden is a veteran activist who’s spent five decades in radical and progressive circles, including 18 in the California Assembly and Senate. His most recent book is Listen Yankee! Why Cuba Matters, and he’s author of this article at The Nation about why he’s voting for Hillary Clinton.- Norman Solomon is a long-time progressive activist and media critic, co-chair of the Coalition for Grassroots Progress, and a co-founder of RootsAction.org. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He’ll be a Sanders delegate to the Democratic National Convention if Bernie Sanders wins more than 10% of the vote in California’s second congressional district.
That progressive activist who’s now supporting Hillary from the first half sounded like he was about to slit his wrists throughout the entire interview.
Epithets are cheap, juvenile ploys, used for a “big lie” affect – repeat them enough times, and listeners take it for real. Solomon never says Clinton, only “war-monger, corporatist-loving Clinton.” How about “deadbeat, terrorist-loving Sanders”? The mind-numbing decay in Solomon’s approach may be a personality twitch, or maybe it’s the hard left’s bad habit. Either way, it fits in with the far right’s style, where Obama is always “emperor Obama.”