Hillary embraces Sanders’ socialist ideas

Donald Trump is Hillary Clinton's trump card. In US politics, a two-term President from one of the two major parties is usually replaced by a President from the other party. Thus, the next American President should be a Republican given incumbent President Barack Obama is a Democrat. Given the negatives that have followed Hillary Clinton on her campaign trail, the Republicans should have been more than confident that the White House's new occupant next year would be from their Party.
Donald Trump single-handedly has placed such a possibility for the Republican Party in serious jeopardy. A rank outsider to start with a year ago, he literally browbeat the Republican Party's leadership to take the nomination that it had no desire to give him if they had their way. Therefore when he won it the democratic way by winning the required number of delegates in the primaries, many of them stayed away to underline their contempt for him.
His policies are, in fact, no policies because he never explained even one seriously. He simply said he would make America great again and make everybody in the country and abroad take note and abide by the rules he set. He came thus far by telling Americans that they are facing an apocalypse and that Washington is the cause and that he is their knight in shining armour and their saviour. A very large number of Republicans believed to give him the Republican nomination although to start with, it looked like only the extreme right was his support base.
It is true that he outlined no policies. Yet he was supported by 14 million to win the nomination. They supported him because while America may not be facing an apocalypse by any stretch of the imagination, there is nevertheless a deep sense of frustration in the country. And also there is a sense of fear. The frustration emerges from the fact that millions of Americans, the middle class and the poor, are going nowhere with their lives and having great difficulties to match between their incomes and their needs. The fear of attack from ISIS and the Jihadists, though overblown, is genuinely embedded in the minds of most Americans.
Immigrants, particularly from the Latin and the Hispanic countries, are growing very fast. Immigrants from other places, from Asia and Muslim countries   are now clearly visible around the country. This has created a phobia among many white Americans that their future would be taken away from them by these immigrants. They find no hope looking at Washington, at both the Republicans and the Democrats, that their fears and phobias would be resolved.
Donald Trump has appealed to these Americans. That has been his trump card - in fact, his only card. These Americans have overlooked at the racist, bigoted, hateful and utterly uncivilised aspects of his messages. They have been led to believe that with him as President, their lives would change and they could be in denial that he was promising to better their lives by means that if they were to reflect upon calmly and rationally, they should be distancing by many miles.
DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION A BREATH OF FRESH AIR: The Democratic Convention (now under way in Philadelphia, in its third and penultimate of its four-day duration at the time of filing this article) has done a great deal to shake the Americans in denial over Donald Trump and his messages. Coming in the wake of the Republican Convention that was dominated by the Trump family that drummed Donald Trump's narcissistic and doomsday messages with Melania Trump caught plagiarising her speech, the Democratic Convention has been a breath of fresh air.
The speech of First Lady Michelle Obama was outstanding. Bill Clinton was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. He revealed the real Hillary Clinton that helped many to know about the Democratic candidate that thus far had been submerged in the heap of lies of the Republican propaganda. Bernie Sanders backed Hillary Clinton in a manner that underlined the strength of democracy and underlined the difference between the two major parties.
The coming together of the Bernie Sanders supporters with the Hillary campaign was the victory of the democratic spirit. The coming together also opened the door for resolving many of the fears of those who have gone behind Donald Trump out of fear of their desperate economic predicament without any hope of a resolution in the near and distant future. Bernie Sanders' campaign for the poor and the middle class led the Hillary Clinton's campaign to accept US$ 15 an hour minimum wage; free college education in the public universities; and universal healthcare. In fact, Hillary Clinton has promised to fulfil almost 80 per cent of his agenda that he would have as President.
Thus Bernie Sanders has forced upon the Democratic Party to accept socialist policies and principles, not afraid of it any more. That is a peaceful revolution for which socialist societies across the world have had to wage armed revolutions. It is a pity that in these times where rationality is shaky in US politics and media, this peaceful revolution that Bernie Sanders has brought about in the world's oldest democracy has not been given the importance that it deserves. Nevertheless, with Hillary Clinton now embracing Bernie Sanders' socialist policies and with her chances of becoming the 45th President very bright, America is on the way to becoming a country where socialist policies and beliefs will not be pariahs and become part of government's policies.
TRUMP'S GIFT TO DEMOCRATS: Donald Trump is ironically the conduit for these positive developments in US politics for without him, the Democratic Party would never have found the courage to embrace Bernie Sanders' socialist ideas. Donald Trump has also helped bring out America's fears out into the open and has given the Democrats the opportunity to show Americans that a lot of their fears are unfounded. For example, law and order that Donald Trump has made into his cause is better today than any time in recent history and the rate of violent crime is on the decline. And recent terrorist attacks have shown that those who carried out attacks in the United States in the name of Islam had no connection with radical Islam abroad and were Muslims in name only.
Donald Trump has given so much ammunition to the Democrats by his messages of doom and disaster - with his dystopia - thus far based on encouraging fear and phobia that unless those who are supporting him now in denial of what he stands for goes further into denial, there could be little hope for the Trump candidature. The Democrats between now and November will have so much ammunition to wake Americans looking at Donald Trump as their candidate that it would be a wonder if many of them do not abandon him eventually.
In fact, if they do not, Donald Trump would still help the Democrats to get his supporters out of their denial to abandon him. After the Democrats had two great days in Philadelphia and Donald Trump was not getting the centre stage in the media, he chose to do so on the morning of the third day of the Democratic Convention by ways he alone could conjure. He could have gone after Hillary Clinton on substantive issues such as the Democratic candidate's nearly 300 days without giving a press conference. Instead, he sought to go after the "emailgate" that he alone now thinks has value for his candidature. And he did that in a manner that an American wanting to become the US President could only do so only in a fit of insanity.
He invited Russia to hack into US Government's official email servers and recover the 30,000 emails that Hillary Clinton had deleted. That is an offer to America's archenemy the freedom to expose US Government's secrets that is treason by any definition. With this insane offer to Russia, Donald Trump has given the Hillary Clinton campaign the greatest ammunition to go after him thus far, that he is totally unfit to be the next President of the United States on the ground of national security alone. And the Democrats are gleefully going to make full use of this Trump gift to them.
POSTSCRIPT: Donald Trump's hopes of regaining the centre stage with his unbelievable offer to Russia has been literally blown off by President Barack Obama's speech on the third day that is now being labelled as the best speech ever in a Convention since live TV became central to covering such an event.
The writer is a retired Ambassador. [email protected]