Lucy Gellman Photo
Sanders volunteers leave campaign literature throughout Milford, N.H.
Milford, N.H. — Robert Reich offered a powerful argument for voting for Hillary Clinton for president — or else for voting for Bernie Sanders.
On back to back days on the New Hampshire campaign trail, supporters of each Democratic presidential candidate invoked a quotation from the former U.S. labor secretary and current UC Berkeley professor to make their case.
A version of Reich’s quotation has gone viral on the Internet: “Hillary has the experience to run the system we have. Bernie is the guy for the system we want.’”
Assembling campaign materials at a Sanders headquarters in Milford, N.H. to begin a canvas on Sunday, Hartford attorney and activist Ken Krayeske cited that version of the Reich quotation in response to a question about his reaction to a New York Times endorsement of Clinton.
“I want a new politics in this country,” Krayeske said. “I want every city in the United States to have a model like New Haven’s public campaign financing program, the Democracy Fund. Do I think that Hillary’s going to get me closer to that reality? I think Bernie is the one pushing policies like free college tuition and ending student debt, things that affect all of us. Whereas I feel like Hillary is on the campaign trail talking to Goldman Sachs. Her experience is on the board of directors of Walmart.”
Ex-C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame gives peptalk to Hillary Clinton supporters in Keene, N.H.
One day earlier and 35 miles to the west, ex‑C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame paraphrased the quotation to make a radically different point.
“I don’t want to say anything derogatory about her opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders,” Plame remarked to a group of volunteers who had gathered for a lunchtime pep-talk in the Clinton campaign’s Keene, N.H. headquarters. “But I was really taken by Robert Reich, former secretary of labor, who said the other day: ‘Bernie Sanders would be a wonderful president for the world we wish we had.’ Free education, free healthcare. But that is not reality. Hillary, to my mind, is the one who is going to be able to take the crazy world that we have and navigate it with confidence and with poise.”
Which interpretation is correct? What does Reich really think about the candidates?
Reich did not respond to requests for comment. [Update: He posted this article Wednesday on his Facebook page and added this comment: “I meant every word. Hillary is clearly the most qualified candidate for the system we now have. Bernie is clearly the most qualified to create the system we should have and need. I don’t find that confusing in the least. Do you?”]
The quotation that both Krayeske and Plame were referencing came from a blog post that Reich posted to his website on Jan. 25 seeking to identify the fundamentally different theories of governance offered by establishment and outsider candidates in the 2016 presidential race.
“I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her,” Reich wrote on his blog. “In my view, she’s the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have. But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change.”
Another slightly different version appears on Reich’s Facebook page: “The fundamental choice facing Democrats starting today in Iowa is not between Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. It’s between accepting what’s feasible under our current political-economic system — where wealth and power are more concentrated at the top than they’ve been in over a century – or changing that system to make it function for the vast majority. In my view, Hillary is best equipped to manage the system we now have. She’s a product of that system; her vast experience and keen insight derive from it. But Bernie Sanders is best equipped to create the system we should have. He has spent most of his life fighting for it, and is now leading a movement to change it.”
For Plame and the Clinton campaigners, Reich’s quotation points to the importance of electing a president capable of working within the current political system to achieve practical, feasible changes. For Krayeske and the Sanders campaigners, Reich’s quotation highlights the integrity and mass appeal of their candidate’s vision for the country, and hinted at the moral bankruptcy and financial corruption of their opponent’s.
Reich’s website, which contains post with titles like “Six Responses to Bernie Skeptics,” suggests that the American voting public should not concede too quickly to the strictures of politics-as-usual.
But these two candidates, though both Democrats, present very different visions for how this country should work, and for how it should be governed. And for two campaigns with such substantive differences, both in policy and approach, every quotation, even the same quotation, becomes subject to varying interpretation and debate.
Click on or download the audio above to listen to a sound collage of Krayeske and Plame riffing on the same Robert Reich quotation.
Lucy Gellman contributed reporting.
Lucy Gellman and Thomas Breen are spending the week in New Hampshire with canvassers, campaign staffers and volunteers, and candidates. The above audio file is just one installment in a playlist of many voices from the road.