Glenn Greenwald Rips The Associated Press for Prematurely Announcing Hillary Clinton’s Victory

“This is the perfect symbolic ending to the Democratic Party primary,” wrote Glenn Greenwald, journalist for The Intercept, on Tuesday. “The nomination is consecrated by a media organization, on a day when nobody voted, based on secret discussions with anonymous establishment insiders and donors whose identities the media organization—incredibly—conceals.”

While noting that the first female presidential nominee of a major political party in the U.S. is symbolically important, Greenwald wrote that there is little else to be thrilled about in the 2016 primary results.

From The Intercept:

[Monday] night, the Associated Press—on a day when nobody voted—surprised everyone by abruptly declaring the Democratic Party primary over and Hillary Clinton the victor. The decree, issued the night before the California primary in which polls show Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a very close race, was based on the media organization’s survey of “superdelegates”: the Democratic Party’s 720 insiders, corporate donors, and officials whose votes for the presidential nominee count the same as the actually elected delegates. AP claims that superdelegates who had not previously announced their intentions privately told AP reporters that they intend to vote for Clinton, bringing her over the threshold. AP is concealing the identity of the decisive superdelegates who said this.

Although the Sanders campaign rejected the validity of AP’s declaration—on the ground that the superdelegates do not vote until the convention and he intends to try to persuade them to vote for him—most major media outlets followed the projection and declared Clinton the winner. … The decisive edifice of superdelegates is itself anti-democratic and inherently corrupt: designed to prevent actual voters from making choices that the party establishment dislikes. But for a party run by insiders and funded by corporate interests, it’s only fitting that its nomination process ends with such an ignominious, awkward, and undemocratic sputter.

None of this is to deny that Hillary Clinton—as was always the case from the start—is highly likely to be the legitimately chosen winner of this process. And just as was true in 2008 with Obama’s nomination, it should be noted that standing alone—i.e., without regard to the merits of the candidate—Clinton’s nomination is an important and positive milestone. Americans, being Americans, will almost certainly overstate its world significance and wallow in excessive self-congratulations … That the Democratic Party nominating process is declared to be over in such an uninspiring, secretive, and elite-driven manner is perfectly symbolic of what the party, and its likely nominee, actually is. The one positive aspect, though significant, is symbolic, while the actual substance—rallying behind a Wall Street-funded, status quo-perpetuating, multimillionaire militarist—is grim in the extreme. The Democratic Party got exactly the ending it deserved.

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— Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata