A final post for me (for now; I’m out of breath) on last night’s debate and mainstream journalists’ coverage of it
E.J. Dionne just posted a column online that will be published in tomorrow’s Washington Post. Here are its last three paragraphs:
But the debate’s most substantive contribution was to the larger philosophical argument the country needs to have in 2016. Republicans plainly still believe their central mission is cutting taxes, shredding regulations and shrinking government. Americans who agree should vote for them.
Democrats clearly believe that government has a role to play in solving the problems of unequal opportunity, imbalances between family life and work, concentrated economic power and wage stagnation. Clinton’s best personal moment may have been when she defended mandated paid family leave from the critique advanced by Republican contender Carly Fiorina that it would be an excessive burden on small business.
Clinton went straight at the GOP’s contradictions: “It’s always the Republicans or their sympathizers who say, ‘You can’t have paid leave, you can’t provide health care,’ ” she said. “They don’t mind having big government to interfere with a woman’s right to choose and to try to take down Planned Parenthood. . . . We should not be paralyzed by the Republicans and their constant refrain, ‘big government this, big government that.’ ”
And one way to end this paralysis is to show, as Sanders is doing, that social democratic countries — including Denmark, another of the night’s stars — have thrived over the years with far more social provisions than we have.
Setting the boundaries of debate is one of the most important tasks in politics. We now have a more realistic sense of the choices before us: Sanders’s unapologetic democratic socialism, Clinton’s progressive capitalism, and the Republicans’ disdain for government altogether. Guess who occupies the real political center?
I love this column. For one thing, it reminded me of the one line of Clinton’s that warmed my heart: “We should not be paralyzed by the Republicans and their constant refrain, ‘big government this, big government that.’ ”
For another, I can’t think of a more apt description of what my candidate, Bernie Sanders, has done. And it shows that Clinton’s sleight of hand will not work. She’s won’t after all get away with conflating Denmark and the old Soviet Union.
I like it except for the last line. Too may people will read that and think :
Sanders : radical leftist
Repubs : radical rightists ( and nutjobs )
Clinton : Oh-so-sensibly centrist. Just what the country wants and needs.
And so , we’ll end up with Obama II , or more accurately , Bush III. I’ll pass on that , thank you.
No Mr. Dionne , the political center – as it would have been measured when we actually had two parties , rather than a single Money Party – is where Bernie Sanders stands , and O’Malley , but not Mrs. Clinton.
I thought that was Sec. Clinton’s WORSE line of the night. It’s not Big Government that is trying to take down Planned Parenthood, but Big Government which is currently FUNDING Planned Parenthood.
I don’t think she was conflating Denmark with the Soviet Union. I think, instead, she was voicing the reality that most Americans reject pure socialism, rightly or wrongly, and that it is important to get elected this time around for a multitude of reasons including, Bev, the Supreme Court.
The choices:
return to Charleston SC and JC Calhoun or
a system with a slight humanity, but not enough to have a civil society.
All want to put war before you and me.
Beverly Mann wrote: “For another, I can’t think of a more apt description of what my candidate, Bernie Sanders, has done.”
I thought I had you pigeonholed a year or two ago. Now you go and do this to me!
Bernie Sanders is resistant to appeals for more gun control. Apparently he has been speaking out against free trade treaties for quite a while. I like those positions and I like that he doesn’t seem to run with the herd.
Why do you think he gets the Socialist label? Does he want the US to follow the French lead or has he just angered the conservative right?
If he was running as an Independent I would commit to vote for him in the general election. But he is running as a Democrat so he does not qualify as a “None of the above” vote. Thus I will have to be more careful to vote on the merits of his positions. (Smiling here)
Sanders gets the socialist label because he calls himself a democratic socialist. (I also wouldn’t call recent trade deals ‘free trade treaties’ because they are not about free trade – they are about extending patent and copyright protection, which are the opposite of free trade, and enhancing corporate rights more generally.)
If the oligarchs(164 families) want to rule the world (which they do) then the black hole of capitalism must be balanced with more socialism. Therefore we may need to create a basic guaranteed income /productivity dividend that offsets job losses from innovation, free trade, predatory capitalism and wealth inequality. This would boost the wages of the middle class and boost the economy. Since consumer spending is the engine that drives the economy and human instinct says we must adapt to survive or social unrest will follow oppression and exploitation. To avoid societal unrest we must either balance socialism with capitalism or extreme measures from both sides will continue. Austerity is the opposite of what inclusive capitalism is trying to make and to where the self worth of having a livable wage job and being tied to achievement is essential to being human. “Policy debates are really about ideology and power” .Joe Stigilitz… IMHO.
” I still found him to be more compelling than the well packaged Clinton fraud, the candidate of the oligarchs now pretending to be the progressive booster of the decimated middle class. ”
” Sanders won the CNN focus group, the Fusion focus group, and the Fox News focus group; in the latter, he even converted several Hillary supporters. He won the Slate online poll, CNN/Time online poll, 9News Colorado, The Street online poll, Fox5 poll, the conservative Drudge online poll and the liberal Daily Kos online poll. There wasn’t, to this writer’s knowledge, a poll he didn’t win by at least an 18-point margin. But you wouldn’t know this from reading the establishment press. “
Fortunately for progressives,Sanders is too smart to run as an independent.
That is because he has read the Constitution and can add.
Doesn’t seem like those two things are that hard, but it appears they are.
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/14/9530177/sanders-regulate-wall-street
” Offering an appealing dose of clarity, Bernie Sanders burst in with his take: “Congress does not regulate Wall Street; Wall Street regulates Congress.”
” To Clinton, policy problems require policy solutions, and the more nuanced and narrowly tailored the solution, the better. To Sanders, policy problems stem from a fundamental imbalance of political power. ”
As always from even our most progressive American hearts the core, underlying economic and political pathology is never mentioned: de-unionization.
Every other market muscling practice is heavily penalized (big jail time — just try to make a movie in the movies). Enforcement — actual enforcement — in the labor market would in turn result in even heavier enforcement in Wall Street and elsewhere.
We have union organizing laws — do we want to repeal them? Then, why don’t we supply the “dentures” needed to enforce them?! Make union busting a felony (RICO prosecution enabled by persistent abuse).
“……she was voicing the reality that most Americans reject pure socialism…….” JackD
What has pure socialism got to do with Denmark, now or in the disgtant past? The Danes run a socially conscious society and economy. That doesn’t make Denmark a socialist state. If anything the Danes have throughout their history represented capitalism and entrepreneurial activism to the nth degree. Early on they might have been accused of demonstrating a “slash, burn and take it” frame of mind. In more modern times they seem to have become content with a “build it and share some of the rewards” concept of social economics. It certainly works well for the Danes and other successful northern European countries. Germany is yet another example. There is nothing about those economies that is Socialist in fact. Regulated capitalism would be more the correct description. And that compares with our mostly unregulated economic system. Our capitalist leaders have become the modern day Vikings of old. They take for themselves and it’s screw those left to flounder.
Beverly,
I agree with JackD but wish to make this even more clear. Hillary not only did not “conflate Denmark with the Soviet Union,” she said exactly zero about Denmark, very carefully so. She implicitly suggested that it does not support small businesses, which it does, in her remarks when she started going on about that aspect of the United States. She did not conflate Denmark and USSR and she did not openly red bait Bernie, although his unfortunate self-labeling of being a “democratic socialist” rather than a “social democrat,” opens him to being identified with the formerly communist party of East Germany that now calls itself “Democratic Socialist.”
That said, Sanders was red baited in the debate, not by HRC, but by Anderson Cooper and shamelessly and disgustinglhy so, without Cooper being called out for this except for a recent post on Daily Kos. It was when he claimed that Sanders and his wife had “honyemooned in the Soviet Union.” Yikes! Perhaps you confused Cooper’s remarks with Cliniton’s? In fact the Sanderses did visit Yaroslavl, USSR in 1988 shortly after they got married. But it was part of a city to city exchange between that city and Burlington, VT, which he was then mayor of, with many civic leaders from Burlington accmpanying them. This was only a honeymoon in terms of timing, and they have both sarcastically referred to it as such. It not at all indicated any great love for the Soviet system, which was very different from the Nordic social democracies, which was what Cooper clearly implied. Unfortunately Sanders did not reply to this, and if Clinton had had his back the way he had hers on the email issue, she might have defended him on that, although it may be that this is one detail she was unaware of.
Hi, JackD. With due respect, my friend—and you know how much I do respect you—I don’t see how those two consecutive sentences of Clinton’s can be interpreted as anything other than a statement that Denmark’s economy is one in which the government owns the businesses, and which has produced a small and shrinking middle class, and that those are the policies that Sanders is proposing. She said:
“We are not Denmark — I love Denmark — we are the United States of America. We would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in the history of the world.”
Timothy Egan had a terrific column about that in yesterday’s NYT, at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/opinion/guess-who-else-is-a-socialist.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0.
As for whether or not it is Clinton rather than Sanders would be the stronger candidate in the general election, I just posted a lengthy post that addresses this. The last paragraph reads:
“Ultimately, Democrats will make their decision about whom to vote for in primaries and caucuses on policy considerations like these. And on whom they believe will be the strongest candidate in the general election. Which will, I think, be determined exactly on the basis of policy considerations like those. This does not necessarily favor Clinton. And Democrats, journalists and consultants who think otherwise have their heads buried in the sand.”
That paragraph links to these articles:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/17/business/putting-numbers-to-a-tax-increase-for-the-rich.html?_r=0
and
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-rural-america-a-startling-prospect-voters-obama-lost-look-to-sanders/2015/10/04/5465ce22-6883-11e5-8325-a42b5a459b1e_story.html.
Marko, yeah, I sort of had the same reaction to that last sentence in Dionne’s column. But I don’t that that’s what’s actually happening now that the immediate afterglow of Clinton’s debate performance is giving way to some actual analysis of what she said and what Denmark actually is like.
I just posted a new, sort of lengthy post about that, at http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2015/10/why-does-clinton-keep-getting-away-with-saying-that-gun-manufacturers-are-the-only-industry-in-america-that-are-immune-from-being-held-accountable-for-criminal-acts-by-the-purchasers-of-their-products.html.