Dear Editor,
America didn’t lose this election, the Democratic National Committee did. They lost it by unfairly helping the former Secretary of State win the nomination. The Democratic Party is the same corrupt top-down organization that it was during the Tammany Hall era. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s leaked emails show that the party’s leadership conspired to nominate their preferred candidate by committing deplorable actions such as improperly funneling money into Clinton’s campaign and making Sanders’ religious views a campaign issue. What many of us Occidental students — as first-time voters — did not know was how much the DNC determines the nominee through superdelegates. Almost a quarter of Clinton’s final delegate count came from 602 elite party members who represented no constituency other than themselves. Only 48 picked Sanders.
The truth is, people hate Clinton and she would not have been nominated without the DNC paving the way for her. While it’s easy for students to say that her detractors are misogynistic, I ask that they have an honest reflection. Think about all of her scandals, from the emails sent from a personal server to the corruption in the Clinton Foundation.
People have been mad as heck about Benghazi for years. I knew I couldn’t vote for Clinton when I heard survivors of the Benghazi attack speak about how much she let them down. I’m not the only one who feels this way about Clinton. A significant amount of Americans could not vote for an individual who not only hired Libyan guards with ties to Al Qaeda to defend one of our embassies but refused to send more American security in the months prior to the attack. Voters chose to pick someone with little to no experience in foreign policy rather than trust Clinton again.
The DNC should have followed the Republicans’ bottom-up approach in picking their nominee. While this method did not result in the RNC’s preferred candidate, it did pick the candidate who best represented what the American people wanted. This is always the ticket with the best chance for the party to win. Had the DNC legitimately allowed its constituents to choose their preferred candidate — from Webb to O’Malley — they would have won.
Furthermore, the bottom-up approach created a much more equitable and exciting race. The RNC’s nomination was contested by Black, Indian, Latino and female candidates. We have to face the facts and admit that the Republican Party is a diverse party and represents all races, genders, sexualities, generations and ideological views. It is not the monolithic body of white cis-gendered males our community so often dismisses it as.
Though I voted for Johnson-Weld, I am optimistic for Trump’s presidency. I encourage you to go to his website and read his “Contract with the American Voter.” Don’t go to some other news source to form your opinion, actually go to his website and click on it. It is literally two pages long. There are probably a lot things you won’t like but there could be some policies you do. One thing is for certain though, he is our next president. We shouldn’t be afraid, but rather excited to see what he can accomplish.
Sumner Schwartz, a junior English major and politics minor. He can be reached at sumnerschwartz@oxy.edu or on Twitter @CATAPOLES. The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
