Consider Your 2016 Election Choices

It looks like 2016 could be the best political year ever. Why would somebody say that? Because for once we have some interesting personalities running who are offering the voters of America some real choices.

Let’s be honest, as much as many of us care for President Obama and were thrilled to vote for him, he’s been a disappointment. He doesn’t stand for much, does he? Not a conservative, not a liberal, just a candidate of the status quo, unwilling to challenge conventional thinking.

The first clue was during the banking crisis of 2008-09, when the banks, having made a series of terrible (and fraudulent) loans, needed to be bailed out. If the President had been smarter, or at least more progressive, he would have bailed out the homeowners, and the homeowners could have paid their loans back to the banks. The banks would have been saved, millions of Americans would have stayed in their homes. Instead the President bailed out the banks, and the banks were able to cash in on the bad loans, destroying the personal wealth of millions of Americans.

At that point many of us should have realized that Obama was a true centrist, closely aligned with Wall Street and the 1 percent, against the interests of working class Americans. The same could be said of Health Care Reform — the President wanted anything, he didn’t really care about the details, so what the American people got was the Bob Dole “personal mandate”, where Americans are forced to purchase overpriced health insurance from the same companies that had made the mess in the first place.

For Democrats, especially on the Left, it should be clear there is a price to be paid for electing just any Democrat. I know many of you would say, “Well, what about the Supreme Court?” to which I’d answer that this President has consistently replaced retired justices with justices who were more conservative than the ones they replaced. Sure, it’s better than John McCain or Mitt Romney appointing justices to the Supreme Court, but isn’t that rather a low bar?

Which brings us to the 2016 election. We Democrats have a choice — we can go with the so called “safe candidate” of Hillary Clinton, who offers little more than a recognizable brand name, or we can go with Bernie Sanders, a candidate who stands for things, a candidate who has ideals, a candidate whom, if he wins, will actually have a mandate to make real change. For me the choice is clear, I’m tired of voting against a Republican, I’m tired of drinking the weak centrist tea the Democrats keep serving up and getting nothing in return. I would rather take the small risk of voting for the candidate who represents my values and the values of my community. Bernie Sanders offers us real change, Hillary Clinton offers us more of the same.

While it would be very exciting to have a real progressive representing us for the first time in living memory, more exciting will be if he can run against TV’s Professional Clown Donald Trump. I didn’t expect the Donald Trump Reality Show to go far, but I must admit it’s been entertaining. Thanks to Donald Trump the Jeb Presidential run has stalled out. As much as I personally dislike Donald Trump, I admire how well he figured out the Republican primary voters, far better than the chattering classes of the political elite, who’ve told us every week for months that “This time the Trump Campaign cannot recover” only to be proven wrong again and again.

Trump vs. Sanders would not only offer Americans a real choice between two men who believe in what they say and actually have differing values and policies, it would be the most entertaining Presidential race of the last 100 years.

So let us in Chapel Hill/Carrboro embrace real a candidate who represents our values and support Bernie Sanders.

By Marc Sylvestre

Consider Your 2016 Election Choices

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