For Sanders and Clinton, Politics Are Personal

Could the clash between Clintonian "realism" and Sandersian "idealism" come down to personal history?

Hillary Clinton's sales pitch to Democrats is simple:

Get real! The Republican-controlled Congress won't even allow President Obama to fill the late Antonin Scalia's vacant seat on the Supreme Court. There is no way these intransigent SOBs will pass pie-in-the-sky bills like Bernie Sanders' proposal to replace Obamacare -- an insurance company-friendly scheme conceived by a right-wing think tank, which Republicans now call socialistic -- with Bernie Sanders' "Medicare for All," which would eliminate insurers in an actually socialistic way.

Clinton says she won't make promises she can't keep. Maybe that, as opposed to the mountains of cash she collects from Big Pharma and health insurance giants, is why she thinks the United States can't join the rest of the First World in universal health care coverage.

Or maybe it's personal. Clinton can't imagine what it's like to live paycheck to paycheck. Should she or Bill ever contract some nasty disease, the Clintons' $110 million nest egg can easily cover the cost.

She's always been personally comfortable. Hillary Clinton grew up solidly middle class, never worrying about her next meal. Her family was made up of right-wing conservatives, and so was she: In 1964, she was a fervently anti-communist "Goldwater girl." She was named a partner of a law firm at age 32. You know the rest of the story.

Smooth sailing, financially if not necessarily romantically.

It wasn't like that for Bernie Sanders (current net worth: $700,000).

Sanders is a product of America's huge, rarely discussed, working class -- people one paycheck away from eviction and homelessness. His father -- whose entire family was later wiped out by Nazis in the Holocaust -- was a salesman who came here from Poland alone and struggled to make a living. He and his wife constantly fought over money. "There were tensions about money, which I think is important," Sanders told me when I interviewed him for my biography, "Bernie."

"There was no sense of long-term security," Sanders recalled. "As a salesman, things can go up and things can go down."

Ultimately, marital tensions fueled by money problems drove young Bernie to move out of the family home, an overcrowded apartment in the hardscrabble Flatbush section of Brooklyn.

Bernie Sanders doesn't like to talk about his past. He views personal biography as a distraction from what he cares about: issues, policies. I suspect there's another reason. Much of his early life was painful.

"My father came to this country with nothing. Economically, what motivated him was security, that is, not losing what he had." Sanders' mother, Dorothy, was an American from the Bronx. "My mother wanted more money and wanted him to get a different job or expand what he was doing. He was very frugal. But if he tried to do that, he would have lost everything."

While Clinton was campaigning for the most right-wing presidential nominee in history, Sanders was marching -- and getting arrested -- for civil rights. Stretched though he and his family were, he worried about those worse off than himself.

Dorothy Sanders suffered from a weak heart -- a health condition aggravated by stress, something that family had in abundance. Shortly after Sanders graduated from high school, Dorothy died.

Sanders went on to college in Chicago, following the hippie trail to Vermont. But he never forgot where he came from. Poverty, Sanders understands, is blight. And in a country as spectacularly wealthy as the United States, it's one that's completely optional, unnecessary and destructive.

Clinton's incrementalist "we can do real health care later" argument reminds me of people who shoot me a quizzical expression when I explain that, after I broke my knee and my skull in a car wreck in 1985, it took me a year to find out because that's how long it took me to land a job with health insurance. They just don't get it.

Clinton and Sanders represent two worldviews: one for whom wealth and privilege have long been assumed as her due, the other whose sympathies lie with those who suffer and die simply because they had the bad luck to be born into the vast majority of Americans who are broke.

Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net and Skewed.net, is the author of "Bernie," a biography written with the cooperation of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. "Bernie" is now on sale online and at all good bookstores. Want to support independent journalism? You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.

COPYRIGHT 2016 TED RALL

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