First off, I think that Hillary Clinton and John Kasich are pretty much the only reasonable candidates left in the race, but I agree with her on most of the basic dividing line issues--choice, LGBT Rights, gun control, etc--so it's not too hard for me.
And yes, Bernie Sanders is an unreasonable candidate. Change for change's sake is pretty dangerous.
Words like "establishment" ring hollow to me. Why is the word "establishment" negative?
Look at all we've established--all the freedoms we have, stability, economic prosperity (unless you've noticed a bread line somewhere that I haven't). Is it perfect? Certainly not! But "break up the big banks"? Why? How?
Not even Bernie knows what it means.
It wasn't Goldman Sachs that lent out all those shitty mortgages. It was little pseudo banks like Countrywide that have largely been eliminated.
And all you New York City Bernie people who are big into climate change as an issue, stop taking Ubers everywhere and use public transportation. You care to talk about climate change, but you don't care much to do anything about it.
The biggest problems we have in this county are partisanship and lack of personal responsibility. To me, Bernie represents the second worst of "Blame someone else" next to Trump. With Trump it's immigrants than are screwing up your life. With Sanders it's corporations. When is anyone going to say "We're screwing ourselves!"
We screw ourselves in a lot of ways. We don't have great options and food supply is an issue, but we mostly choose to eat like crap, driving up healthcare costs.
The gap between the rich and the poor has a lot to do with racist policies... And oh guess what white people, you've been plenty racist for a long time without the help of big corporations.
And who are corporates? It's us! Who do you think is running them?
Robots?
It's us, feeding at the trough. It's no different than your local cops and firemen getting pension and health benefits that the average non-public employee can only dream off. They take as much as they can get, no different than the CEOs you love to hate--only when they take money out of the taxpayer pockets, it's a relatively small figure at a time. You hardly noticed you're getting fleeced by your next door neighbor.
Sanders and Trump, while at opposite ends of the spectrum politically, don't have the first clue about international politics or how the economy actually works. They just like to yell and complain without much in the way of solutions. Hillary hasn't exactly wow'd me with some amazing set of solutions--but what political candidate has?
The best solutions piss a lot of people off, so you wind up with mediocre group think--you can't really get elected otherwise. But Hillary is probably the most qualified candidate I've ever seen in my lifetime. She understands how the system works and is thoughtful.
Like Obama, Hillary understands that you don't govern with slogans. You govern with nuance, because problems are complex. She and John Kasich are by far the most qualified people left standing, and poor John Kasich--the Republicans are even more screwed up than the Democrats.
It's just not even close for me.
I know why people want to love Bernie, because you think he represents real change, but it just doesn't work that way. No one in the system wants huge change... and frankly, the system mostly works pretty decently... with lots of room for improvement but the country is stable, people get fed, work, etc. You want to know what happens when you get some bright eyed and bushy tailed populist candidate who thinks they're just going walk in and waive a magic wand and fix all our problems with obvious solutions that we'd all benefit from?
Read what happened to Schwarzenegger in California.
"He came into office with boundless faith in the American people—after all, they had elected him—and figured he could always appeal directly to them. That was his trump card, and he played it. In November 2005 he called a special election that sought votes on four reforms: limiting state spending, putting an end to the gerrymandering of legislative districts, limiting public-employee-union spending on elections, and lengthening the time it took for public-school teachers to get tenure. All four propositions addressed, directly or indirectly, the state’s large and growing financial mess. All four were defeated; the votes weren’t even close. From then until the end of his time in office he was effectively gelded: the legislators now knew that the people who had elected them to behave exactly the way they were already behaving were not going to undermine them when appealed to directly. The people of California might be irresponsible, but at least they were consistent."
It's hard to get excited about incremental change, but it's the only change that works. Smart, experienced people promise you what they can do.
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders aren't candidates, they're circus acts. Circus acts promise you the world and are fun for a little while, sure, but not over four years.