Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

Political Rants

Proof of concept.

I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed by the “Super Tuesday” results. All night, the thing that kept ringing in my ears was the memory of Tom Brokaw back in 1984 saying, “Looks like another good night for Walter Mondale,” and just how nauseating that moment felt. Tuesday was a similarly nauseating experience, except that, if anything, I have less confidence in Biden as a candidate than I did in Mondale. I should say here that I am no stranger to political disappointment; very, very rarely does my first choice candidate rise to the top. That’s partly a function of my being to the left of the Democratic party, but it’s also due to the fact that I do not have a deep connection to the party as an institution.

Like most institutions, the Democratic party favors some people over others for leadership positions within the party. That dynamic pushes forward senior, well-connected, establishment politicians – people like Biden, Hillary Clinton, Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, etc. – regardless of their relative talents, ability to connect with voters, etc. With regard to the presidential race, more often than not, they prevail, and when they prevail, more often than not, they lose in the general. Obama was an insurgent who became the establishment – he didn’t start at the top. Hillary was favored to win in 2016 because it was her turn; she lost on her own merits, or lack of same. Biden is being advance for the same reason – it’s his turn. It’s far from obvious that he’s the strongest candidate to go up against Trump, but that, it seems, is an afterthought for party leaders.

Sure looks like a lot of people.

All that said, Bernie should have performed better Tuesday night. Which proves the obvious: grassroots organizing is hard, tremendously hard. No one even pretends that Biden has a grassroots activist organization – nothing of the sort. Bernie does, but they missed the mark on Tuesday, for the most part. A candidate like Bernie can only prevail if he has a mass movement behind him. What he’s proposing from a policy standpoint is reliant on the existence of such a movement. Bernie is quite frank about that. Without the movement, there’s no Sanders presidency and no Sanders agenda. So these primaries amount to proof of concept at some level. If he can’t build the support now, it wouldn’t be there for him later. His agenda cannot succeed on the basis of a narrow win against Trump. We need a progressive wave, and thus far, it hasn’t materialized.

My hope is that the movement does rise in time to put Bernie over the top. But if it doesn’t, make no mistake – we will still need the movement for what’s ahead of us. Our survival as a species depends on it.

luv u,

jp

New podcast drops

I’ve launched a new political commentary podcast called Strange Sound. It’s free, it’s brief, and it’s available now at anchor.fm/strangesound.

Political Rants

Clueless Rudy.

Impeachment is now officially under way. That’s not what I’ll write about today, however, because you are most likely hearing about that absolutely everywhere else, and I have little or nothing to add to what’s being said elsewhere. Today I’ll opine on the career and slime trail of former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose evident losing battle with dementia is being televised nightly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people ask, what happened to Rudy? The answer is simple: nothing. Like Trump, he’s just as nasty as he ever was, only older and more scrambled.

Because of the nature and the timing of the 9/11 attacks, many people remember Giuliani fondly as “America’s Mayor”, I think mostly because he didn’t run up the street screaming when the towers fell. What he was then, of course, was a failed mayor at the end of his term, a man with the blood of many people of color on his hands, and an immensely corruptible individual whom Jimmy Breslin once famously described as a small man in search of a balcony. Well … he found that balcony, and then some. Anyone who remembers Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, and Abner Louima knows something about what policing was like in NY City under America’s mayor. His personal abuses were legendary. At one point during his tenure, I remember a random cab driver (unofficial one; the 90s equivalent of an Uber driver) complaining about how Giuliani’s lover’s kids would run wild in the driver’s apartment building, bragging that they had mayoral protection. But I digress …

Why pick this photo? Because he effing deserves it.

After achieving hero status in the wake of 9/11 (despite his placement of the emergency command center up a few precarious floors in the World Trade Center after the 1993 attack and his sweetheart contract with Motorola for emergency communications that failed on the fateful day), Giuliani went out into the world, proffering his supposed expertise in security and anti-terrorism, helping police agencies, despotic governments, and corporations keep the rabble in line … for a steep consulting price. I suspect he thinks of Trump as just another despot who needs his services, and he would be right. Now, in his dotage, Giuliani may make a lot less sense, but he is still treated with some deference in foreign capitals, and more so thanks to his close association with the president of the United States.

Let’s be clear: in 2016, Giuliani openly bragged just days before the election about the New York office of the FBI having the goods on Hillary Clinton. A short time later, the story broke about Anthony Weiner’s laptop and the revival of the email probe, effectively torpedoing any chance of a Clinton victory. He and Trump relied on this tactic to get candidate Trump over the electoral finish line. It worked then, and it may work again without some real effort on the other side.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

That thing that matters.

While you were looking over there, this week the Trump administration set the wheels in motion to lock-in a structural electoral advantage for white people and conservatives for the next generation. They argued before the Supreme Court in favor of including a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, challenges to which have been upheld by lower courts, and it looks pretty promising for them, based on comments from the bench. A decision in favor of the administration would be very bad news for any hope of not only electoral and policy victories in the short term, but also equitable distribution of services and resources in the years and decades to come, so this is probably literally the most important story in the country this week, and the coverage has been relatively cursory.

The fact is, there is already a slanted playing field, tilted toward the Republican party’s core constituencies, regardless of what Trump claims. Just look at what happened in 2016. For the second time in four presidential election cycles, a GOP candidate won the presidency with an electoral majority and a popular vote minority, only this time, the discrepancy between the two results was far greater than it was in 2000. The 2016 election was 304 Trump to 227 Clinton in the electoral college, but 48.2% Clinton to 46.1% Trump in the popular vote – a nearly 3 million vote plurality. Gore’s popular vote margin of victory in 2000 was one-tenth the size, but he only lost the electoral college by 4 votes (271 Bush to 266 Gore). Not a positive trend, and the story in the Senate is very similar – outsized influence on the part of white voters in more rural regions has us gradually drifting towards a persistent GOP majority. (Don’t even get me started on gerrymandering.)

Elections have consequences. This is one.

The Census case before the Supreme Court is potentially the final nail in the coffin of progressive hopes for some recovery from the losses we’ve suffered over the past decade. As I’ve said previously, elections have consequences – namely, a solid reactionary majority on the Supreme Court, an increasingly reactionary bench in the lower courts, the undermining of voting rights, reproductive rights, immigrant rights, environmental policy, you name it. Activism is vital, crucial, particularly as it relates to ground-level organizing, but we cannot neglect a progressive electoral strategy – one that both strives to move the country in a more leftward direction, while at minimum reducing harm to the most vulnerable populations.

We failed in the latter respect in 2016, particularly, losing our last chance to steer the Supreme Court in a new direction. We must fight on, but the road ahead is steeper than it was before.

luv u,

jp