Tag Archives: Bill Clinton

Political Rants

Two heads.

The thing called Trump is attempting a new strategy this week: slap some lipstick on the race-baiting pig and hope that that’s enough to convince wealthier, suburban G.O.P. voters that they are not, in fact, racists themselves. How do you do that without abandoning the psychotic core of the party of Lincoln? Well, you hire Kelly Anne Conway AND Steve Bannon. Bannon will cavort with alt-right neo-nazis and Kelly Anne will deftly smooth it all over. It’s like that guy-with-two-heads movie – one head is a racist Ray Milland and the other is 1970s Rosy Greer. That’s the Trump campaign in a nutshell.

The Thing with Two HeadsConway is a good con artist. I suppose you could find her convincing if you choose to forget that in 2012, Trump was birther-in-chief, claiming that his operatives were turning up “unbelievable” stuff on Obama’s birth certificate – a campaign that was always about race, about being the “other”, about legitimacy. I suppose you could buy what she’s selling if you choose to forget the last year or so of fevered rhetoric – NOT gaffes or errors, but deliberate, repeated statements – about immigration, about foreign policy, about law enforcement policy. And I suppose you could believe Conway’s contention that Trump is a hard-working, honest fellow who treats people well if you haven’t been paying attention to the last 30 years of his very public life. I guess you can believe whatever you want to believe if you try really, really hard.

This is a tough sell, though. Fortunately for Trump, his opponent is Hillary Clinton, and the Clintons are experts at shooting themselves in the foot. Indeed, their drive to reclaim the White House has put us in severe danger of having Trump elected president. That, to my mind, is the most irresponsible thing Hillary Clinton has ever done, save perhaps her vote in favor of authorizing the use of force against Iraq.

Everyone knows that the Clintons are larger-than-life public figures, scandal magnets, and supreme triangulators on policy. In the current phase of American life, probably none of this matters. The political ground has shifted significantly since Bill was president; the Democrats are more weighted to the left than in the 1990s, and the future of the party is substantially to the left of Hillary. That gravitational pull is affecting her now and it would continue affecting her as president. Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t feel that attraction whatsoever, and he will lean right to keep his flank happy.

So Clinton v. Trump is a match mad in hell. But let’s not resort to false equivalencies, like Michael Steele and others tend to do. Trump is just a dangerous person to allow anywhere near a position of authority, and anyone who supports him should have his/her head – or heads, in the case of Conway/Bannon –  examined.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Big tent, little tent.

The news of this week, campaign-wise, has been the minor uprising at the Nevada Democratic party convention. The reason for this, I’m sure, is that this is the story the Clinton campaign and its supporters wanted us to be talking about. For months they have been trying to frame Bernie Sanders and his supporters as aggressive, undisciplined, even violent political loose cannons. The protest in Nevada, as it was covered on television, appeared to conform to that narrative, helped along by the strategic release of some crank calls that came in to the voicemail of a party official. So, on a week when Sanders virtually tied Clinton in Kentucky and beat her by ten points in Oregon, the take-away will be that he can’t and won’t control his people.

Clinton's thin blue lineThis smells a lot like rat-fucking to me. The Clinton operation is pretty good at it, especially when they have the DNC and the entire party establishment in their corner. Then there’s the David Brock effort, using tactics that he once focused on the Clintons themselves. But beyond the specifics of this campaign, what we’re seeing is kind of a Democratic party tradition: piss on the activist left, even when it’s likely to cost you the election. When have they ever not done this? From the marginalization of black southern voices in 1964, to shutting out antiwar voices in 1968, to undermining the McGovern campaign in 1972, the Dems always find a way to keep the lid on the progressive box.

That is, until now. It’s one thing to shut Jesse Jackson out in 1988 when he had won 11 contests (including 7 primaries) and almost 7 million votes. But the Sanders phenomenon is even more imposing, and not really centered around a candidate so much as a set of policies and ideas. It is in many ways a generational uprising, like Occupy Wall Street 2.0, emerging from the landscape unexpectedly. It is the center of energy on the Democratic side, and as far as I can see, the Clinton campaign – which is winning – is making no effort to engage this movement in any meaningful way. The fact is, they are treating the Bernie folks with the kind of contempt the Democratic establishment has traditionally reserved for the party’s left flank. That won’t wash this time.

The Clintons may really blow this election. If they don’t start making an effort to establish a productive, cooperative relationship with Sanders supporters … to meet them a bit more than halfway … they are not only going to lose, but they will also squander the future of their own party. That’s the choice. We can’t afford to pick the wrong path, people. Too much at stake.

luv u,

jp

Uncategorized

After party.

Just some random thoughts on the major party conventions, now that they’re over. Don’t have a lot of time to write this, so it’s going to be… well, random.

Tale of Two Crackers. Bill Clinton’s big speech on Wednesday night capped what seems to me like a political rehabilitation of monumental proportions. At some point, everybody started loving Bill Clinton, and he has become a major statesman … or as close to that as you can come in this age. It wasn’t terribly surprising to see this process happen with Ronald Reagan, who – despite having a spotty popularity rating during his presidency – the media always portrayed as wildly popular, and around whom an image-enhancement industry of sorts has been at work since his departure. But Clinton? Does anyone remember how denigrated he was throughout his presidency? I suppose people have gradually come to the realization that things weren’t so bad in the 1990s … since everything since then has pretty generally sucked.

That brings me to the second cracker – W. Bush. During Clinton’s long speech, while people were hanging on every word, it was hard not to think of W’s total absence from his own party’s convention, both in person and in rhetoric. If this election is truly about a competition between two distinct approaches to government, this contrast speaks volumes about the degree to which each vision (1) has a record of success and (2) is something its proponents can advance with confidence.

Turnaround. Is America ready for a turnaround, Romney-style? I think we’ve already gotten a piece of that. Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on Mitt Romney’s history at Bain Capital illustrates a bit of what we can expect from a Romney administration. The short story is this: Like the corporate raiders of the 1980s, Bain would do leveraged buy-outs of companies – basically buy them on credit with relatively little money down. The resulting debt would then be held by the company. Then they would compel the company to monetize its assets for dividend payments to its new shareholders – the people at Bain and its partners. What is left is the husk of a company that had already been under stress before Bain’s arrival and is now buried under a crushing debt burden, its assets sold off to enrich others.

That’s the Romney plan for America, in a nutshell. The G.O.P., if elected, will do what it always does – borrow massively (i.e. leverage), cut taxes for the rich (i.e. dividend payment to investors), privatize (i.e. monetize assets), and deregulate. You don’t need an MBA to figure out where that’s headed.

luv u,

jp