Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: It’s Important

Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: It’s Important

An explanation for why defeating Donald Trump—despite what we know about Hillary Clinton—should be the left’s primary national electoral objective this November

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/08/18/vote-lying-neoliberal-warmonger-its-important

By: Adolph Reed Jr.
Date: 2016-08-18

In 1991, former Klansman and American Nazi Party functionary David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana and made the runoff election against Democrat Edwin Edwards, the popular but scandal-plagued three-term former governor. Duke had made the runoff between the two top vote-getters since no one received a majority in the first primary. Duke had received just over 31% of the vote in the first primary, and Edwards had just over 33% in a twelve-person field.

The stage was set for a bitter, intense campaign between a Republican with a history of open advocacy of virulent racism and nativism and a deeply flawed corporate Democrat. The many different dangers that a Duke victory augured for the state provided the basis for a broad and bipartisan business-center-left electoral alliance that condensed around a least common denominator slogan that no doubt every Louisianan who was sentient at the time recalls: “Vote for the Crook: It’s Important.” Edwards won, with more than 61% of the vote, and a potential political and economic disaster for the state was avoided. (In 2001 Edwards, who had boasted during an earlier investigation that the only way Louisianans would turn on him would be if he were “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy,” was convicted of racketeering and spent the next decade in prison.)

Hillary Clinton at a post-DNC rally in Philadelphia last month. (Photo: neverbutterfly/flickr/cc)Read more »