With Trump now practically assured of the republican candidacy and the only remaining race being that between Hillary and Bernie, Ralph Nader, a former presidential candidate himself, had some disturbing if accurate words about the democratic primary process. In a story published in US News, Nader said that Hillary Clinton is "going to win by dictatorship" in the Democratic race against Bernie Sanders.
"Twenty-five percent of superdelegates are cronies, mostly. They weren't elected," Nader, an activist and former Green Party presidential candidate, said on Friday.
"They were there in order to stop somebody like Bernie Sanders, who would win by the vote."
Clinton, the Democratic front-runner in the race for the White House, has secured 2,240 of the 2,383 delegates needed to clinch her party's nomination, according to the Associated Press delegate tracker. Her nearly insurmountable lead is mostly due to the backing of 524 superdelegates, the unbound powerbrokers who make their vote at the July convention.
Sanders has tried to woo these votes to his sidel the Vermont senator has 1,473 delegates total, including just 40 superdelegates.
Sanders is vowing to fight until the Democratic National Convention in late July, citing his "momentum" from winning recent states. Still, Clinton has won some 3 million more votes than Sanders during the primaries.
Nader actually had some good words to say about Trump, saying the Donald has brought some important issues to the fore. "He's questioned the trade agreements. He's done some challenging of Wall Street – I don't know how authentic that is. He said he's against the carried interest racket, for hedge funds. He's funded himself and therefore attacked special interest money, which is very important," Nader says. "But he's lowered the level of political debate to unheard-of depths of salacious, slanderous and vacuousness, garnished with massive self-boosterism and repetition."
Well, if that's what America wants...
On the other hand, Nader unleashed on Hillary, whom he accused of being a "corporatist, militarist Democrat" who would have been defeated by Sanders if every state held an open primary. Nader also said that he thinks Sanders "made very few mistakes" during his White House bid and would present a bigger challenge to presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in November.
"[H]e couldn't do anything about the superdelegates. But he almost won and he would've won," Nader said cited by The Hill. "He would've defeated Trump easily, much more easily than [Clinton] would've defeated him."
"He doesn't produce gaffes. He's very consistent and he's scandal-free. What politician 35 years in office is scandal-free?"
Nader is right, but the reason for Bernie's lack of gaffes perhaps has to do with his ideology that has kept him out of contentuous congressional fights where every politician is required to bend if hoping to get their way. Which is not to say that unlike Hillary, Bernie doesn't believe his ideology - he most certainly does, and fervently at that, something which is apparent during all of his speeches. The only problem is that the thing he believes in is socialism. For a quick and recent primer on what happens under socialism, just search for Venezuela, or any other recent failed state.
Finally, while Clinton may defeat Bernie, what happens in November is a different story. here Nader thinks that Trump will ultimately will defeat himself this fall: "Trump will turn the Republican Party into the Trump Dump," he quips, but adds it's not impossible that the New York real estate mogul wins because of Clinton's vulnerability to scandal.
"You never know when the shoe's going to drop on either of them," Nader says of Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Which is precisely the reason why this presidential election has quickly turned into not only the most scandalous, but also most entertaining one in US history.