Is it just me, or is the Clinton campaign’s take on how to appeal to African-American voters really demeaning?
It’s worth noting that Clinton has an interesting built-in advantage here. Clinton is campaigning as the candidate of continuity, at least in the sense that she is promising to build incrementally on the Obama agenda, while Sanders is implicitly arguing that the change of the Obama era has been woefully insubstantial when compared with the scale of our challenges. Clinton’s positioning as the steward of the Obama agenda may alone give her an edge with nonwhite voters.
— Hillary Clinton is placing a huge bet on nonwhite voters, Greg Sargent, this morning
To me, one of the most striking things about Clinton’s campaign is the ships-that-pass-in-the-night feel between the very nature of her campaign and the public mood, generally but certainly among a very large swath of Democrats and Dem leaners. Mostly, her campaign is about her. A week or two ago, I clicked a link to a video of an event in New Hampshire a day earlier in which Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s introduction of Clinton, as the latter stood nearby waiting to take the stage, consisted (at least in the clip I saw) of reminding the crowd of how awesome Clinton was throughout that 11-hour Senate-committee Benghazi hearing. As if that absolutely, definitely, for sure indicates that she will cow Republican senators and House members into enacting progressive legislation she wants.
It really fascinates me that so many prominent Democrats and progressives think that’s the end-all-and-be-all as an indicator of a successful Hillary Clinton administration. These folks really should get out more. To, say, well, almost anywhere outside of Washington, DC or New York City.
No surprise that Clinton talks incessantly about herself. On Tuesday it was that SHE WON THE IOWA CAUCUSES. Earlier it was that she’s now a grandmother. And in between these persuasive arguments was an equally persuasive one: That she knows how it feels to be the one to have to decide whether a presidential inauguration public ceremony should go on in the face of a credible threat of a terrorist attack.
That link is to a post of mine from two weeks ago in which I also said this:
What worries me more than anything else about a Clinton general election campaign is her propensity to say obviously silly things. Elsewhere in that speech, in Clinton, IA on Friday, she again repeated her (and her daughter’s) complaint—without any hint of recognition of irony—that Sanders’ single-payer healthcare insurance plan would kill Obamacare. As if it weren’t the very purpose of a single-payer healthcare insurance system to eliminate private healthcare insurance for the benefits that the single-payer plan provides. As if the purpose of Obamacare was to create some living monument to Obama, rather than to provide healthcare insurance to people who had no access to it, and provide decent insurance to people who had policies that provided almost no coverage.
Which I think makes the point that that quote above from Greg Sargent highlights: Clinton believes that African-Americans think the purpose of Obamacare was to create some living monument to Obama, rather than to provide healthcare insurance to people who had no access to it, and provide decent insurance to people who had policies that provided almost no coverage. And that they think that everything else Obama did must be preserved in granite because, well … Obama.
They like him and support him. And aren’t as discriminating in their analyses as, y’know, whites. Or at least as whites who don’t feel that very same way about Ronald Reagan (a rapidly diminishing crowd now, although the Republican Establishment hasn’t noticed).
I just don’t know about that. Me? I suspect that most African-Americans know well that Obamacare was a necessary comprise, and know that there are still many millions of people who have no healthcare insurance. And that large premiums to private insurers, and large co-payments and deductables requiring very significant personal expenditures, don’t make for a situation in which huge numbers of Americans aren’t pervasively in fear of needing expensive medical care, or of being unable to pay the premiums, or both.
And that citizens of no other wealthy Western-style democracy live this way.
Clinton’s marketing pitch is that she is a progressive who gets things done. “I come to you with a lifetime of service and advocacy and of getting results,” was, as noted by Dana Milbank in a commentary post that otherwise itself misses the ship, “her less-than-soaring pitch” at a community college in Nashua yesterday. But what results exactly has she gotten? She’s never specific, except about foreign-policy achievements as secretary of state. And either are her many boosters among the mainstream-commentary crowd, although they recite this mantra regularly.
Milbank worries about what he says is Clinton’s tendency to get bogged down in the details of her policy proposals when she speaks at events, boring her audience. (Maybe it’s the policy proposals themselves that are the problem.) But from where I sit, which is not at a Clinton campaign event, the problem is the opposite of too much detail. It’s the incessant two-or-three-sentence soundbite stupidities she repeats, again and again.
Like that she wants to raise incomes, not taxes. (A winner!) Or that we don’t want to subside college tuition for Donald Trump’s grandchildren. (Sanders doesn’t either; he plans to tax Donald Trump enough to pay Trump’s grandchildren’s public college tuition, should they deign to attend a public college, and have a bit left over to subsidize others’ grandchildren’s college tuition, to boot!)
The New York Times reported yesterday that some supporters close to Clinton (read: her husband, I’m betting) want her to demote the campaign’s manager, Robby Mook, whose strength is in organizing and implementing get-out-the-vote drives. But unless he also is the one who feeds her those soundbites and tacks—and I’m betting he’s not—replacing Mook would be as effective as killing the messenger. Mook got out the vote. It’s Clinton who didn’t.
And it’s not promising that Clinton and some people close to her apparently don’t see this.
It is just you, Beverly. You have made it abundantly clear that youi hate Hillary’s guts and that whatever she does or says you will do your best to twist it into something simply awful. What you have here is jus tmore of the same.
Have fun.
I vote in NH. I am attending a Bernie rally tomorrow PM at UNH.
I am a graying 1960’s era short haired ROTC hippie. I have come a long way. The Iraq vote and HRC’s assured condemnation of Iran turned me off. On that I am one issue!
The rest of her progressive stump line is BS; she is into warring in the middle east forever.
Clinton’s have been in the past and present the problem with the Democratic Party which has decimated the middle class and the poor.
For more facts of the Clinton reign of terror on 90% of the USA population.
See………http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/01/the-times-endorses-hillary-clinton-with-a-banner-ad-from-citigroup/
“Hillary Clinton is the woman who stood by her man as multiple women came forward to accuse him of adultery or sexual assaults. Hillary Clinton is the woman who served as First Lady as Bill Clinton eviscerated the lives of poor children and single mothers by enacting welfare reform, a program so draconian that Senator Edward Kennedy called it “legislative child abuse” and voted against it.”
“According to the Center for Responsive Politics, among the top five largest lifetime donors to Hillary’s campaigns, Citigroup tops the list, with three other Wall Street banks also making the cut: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. (The monies come from employees and/or family members or PACs of the firms, not the corporation itself.)”
Hillary Clinton said the Clinton’s were broke when they left the white house.
Then bought a home where annual house tax was close to 30 thousand a year. How many of us would like to be so poor?
I think it is just you, Bev. Bit of a mystery to me, but Clinton is exceptionally strong with black(and latino) voters. While her husband’s policies can certainly be looked upon as negative towards these minority voters, you have to remember the fact that Clinton was the first President that did not ignore them.
“Take the recent Monmouth University poll of the Democratic race. Between December and January, Clinton lost her lead with white Democrats. Indeed, it vanished, dropping 23 points. Now, she’s tied with Sanders, 43 percent to 43 percent. But she’s grown her lead with black and Latino Democrats, winning 71 percent to 21 percent for the Vermont senator, up from 61 percent in January.
This lead with black and Latino Democrats isn’t just responsible for Clinton’s margin in national polling—where she outpaces Sanders by an average of 13 points—it’s responsible for her massive lead in the South Carolina primary, where black voters predominate and where Clinton crushes Sanders with an average margin of 40 points (although there’s been little polling in the state since the new year).
Which gets to a broader, more important point. Minority voters—and black Americans in particular—are the firewall for Clinton’s candidacy and the Democratic establishment writ large. As long as Clinton holds her lead with black Democrats, she’s tough (if not impossible) to beat in delegate-rich states like New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas. Even with momentum from wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, it’s hard to see how Sanders overcomes Clinton’s massive advantage with this part of the party’s electorate . That’s not to say he won’t excel as an insurgent candidate, but that—barring a seismic shift among black Democrats, as well as Latinos—his coalition won’t overcome her coalition.
This, in itself, raises a question. Why are black Americans loyal to Hillary Clinton? What has she, or her husband, done to earn support from black voters? After all, this is the era of Clinton critique, especially on questions of racial and economic justice. The Crime Bill of 1994 supercharged mass incarceration; the great economic boom of the 1990s didn’t reach millions of poor and working-class black men; and welfare reform couldn’t protect poor women in the recession that followed. And the lax regulation of the Clinton years helped fill a financial bubble that tanked the global economy and destroyed black wealth.
At the same time, it is important to view the relationship between black voters and the Clintons in the context of the times when it was forged. During the Republican presidencies of the 1980s, black voters felt alienated and ignored by mainstream politics. Even Democrats seemed to keep their distance, a sense that helped fuel Jesse Jackson’s bids for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1988.
From the beginning of his campaign, Bill Clinton did the opposite. Neither he nor his wife took blacks for granted, assiduously campaigning for the black vote in every possible venue. He emphasized his childhood in the segregated South and pledged to appoint blacks to high-ranking positions. In an approach that Barack Obama would mimic 16 years later, Clinton focused his efforts on black civic and community organizations, from church networks to civil rights groups. It paid off. Black voters carried Clinton through the Southern primaries and gave him the margins he needed to win the nomination.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/01/hillary_clinton_s_ties_to_black_democrats_will_save_her_campaign_from_bernie.html
EM:
They are also the growing part of the population.
I like Bernie, I liked Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern too and stuffed envelopes for Gene and voted for George and learned that since LBJ this is a center right country unless African Americans, Latinos and women vote in large numbers and then it is a center-center country. A Democratic Socialist is not likely to win the presidency in this country at this time and even if he did he would face a GOP majority in the House and at best have a slight Democratic edge in the Senate which would certainly not be filibuster proof and likely would contain several Democrats who are plainly DINOs. In other words while he will not face the racism that Obama has (although anti Semitism may be an issue) he would likely accomplish even less than Obama has to date. I for one am not willing to take the chance that Bernie can beat Rubio or whoever the GOP come up with when none of the things I like about him will ever be achieved by him. Do you really want to run the risk that the GOP will be selecting Supreme Court justices for the next 4 or 8 years Beverly? You must really hate Hillary a lot. I think it is perfectly reasonable to support Bernie’s positions and even support him in the primaries, but do it based on the superiority of those positions over Hillary’s. Do not do it by tearing Hillary down although I admit she is typically somewhat tone deaf. She is almost certainly going to be the Democrats’ nominee and I think she has a much better chance than Bernie of winning the general election particularly if Obama and her husband campaign for her and she can approach Obama’s numbers with minority and young voters while improving on his numbers with white older voters.
The entire media commentary is demeaning toward blacks. They assume that blacks won’t take a careful look at Sanders , and will just reflexively vote for Clinton. I think they’ll be surprised , or rather , shocked , by the voting results. The establishment anti-Bernie propaganda we’ve seen to date is just a trickle compared to the flood we’ll get once the panic starts to set in. The moneyed class will pull out all the stops , and spend any sum , to keep another FDR out of the White House.
Are blacks voting in primaries likely to think that the Washington Post and NYT are on their side ? How about Citi , Goldman , JP Morgan , BOA , etc. ? Are they on the side of the black underclass ? This is not a choice between a Democrat and a Republican , it’s between a Money Party Democrat and a man with a deep and long-lasting belief in the concept of social justice , a man that MLK , were he alive today , would heartily endorse , I’m quite certain.
The pollsters are part of the establishment. Wait until you see the actual votes. This ain’t over , not by a long shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=645mtthz8Io&app=desktop
Every time I see a reference to “FDR” I shudder, unless it also mentions the makeup of Congress during his terms.
A movement needs a leader. It also needs power behind it.
That ain’t happening until 2020 at least, and that depends on state elections, the biggest problem the progressive movement has.
As Sanders said in his debate last night. We are looking for an expanded electric. Remember few politicians lead; if Sanders does keep inspiring more an more people to come out and vote; this will give him the power to make real changes.
C’mon, Beene.
Neither Bernie nor Clinton will have any ability whatsoever to make any real changes, at least until 2021.
Let’s keep our eye on the ball.
EMichael, we will agree to disagree. I do believe if Sanders expands the number of people voting; like in Iowa, politicians will see the writing on the wall.
I think you should spend some time looking at Congress and the forthcoming seats up for re election.
And I have no idea what you are talking about in terms of the Iowa turnout.
Caucus turnout: Robust, record-setting and surprising
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2016/02/02/caucus-turnout-robust-record-setting-and-surprising/79626128/
caucus in a state where 91% of the people are white.
U tubes mean nothing
“Monmouth University Polling Institute 1/19/16
Clinton has lost ground with nearly every major Democratic voting bloc since December. Her biggest drops have come among self-described liberals, going from a 57% –31% advantage over Sanders
one month ago to a 42% –51% deficit in the current poll. She has also dropped significantly among women (from a 64%–19% lead last month to a smaller 54% –35% edge now) and voters under the age
of 50 (from a 52%–35% lead to a 39%–52% shortfall).
However, Clinton has held onto high levels of support from two crucial groups. Voters over the age of 50, who make up the lion’s share of the actual primary electorate, continue to support her over Sanders by a substantial 64% –24% margin, similar to her 67% –16% lead among this group in December. Furthermore, black and Latino voters, who will comprise a large share of the vote in South Carolina and Nevada as well as in many Super Tuesday states, solidly support her by a 71% –21%
margin, which is actually an increase over her 61% –18% lead last month.”
http://www.monmouth.edu/assets/0/32212254770/32212254991/32212254992/32212254994/32212254995/30064771087/4d7b2106-b632-4b79-a6ed-7afc73902d4c.pdf
Long tough road and not a lot of time for Sanders to cut into his huge deficit with these voters, without whom he cannot possibly win.
Iowa and NH are totally unimportant to this process other than the debates.
As already said, we agree to disagree.
We can continue after SC.
EMichael, remember it was a democratic congress that saved Bushs’ tax cut for the rich.
Beene, please.
That was a pretty long article when “I do not support Hillary and in fact do not even like her” might have worked as well. My perspective is if you do not want her to be the Democratic nominee, start talking about those e-mails. That might derail her, but grinding on over ACA versus single-payer won’t. Why folks are shy to talk about the e-mails is interesting to me in that it is clearly a legitimate issue to discuss a recent Sec. of State’s handling of nationally sensitive information if she wants to be President. She’s all grown up and can defend herself, certainly. If you really do not like her saying “She’s reckless with critical national secrets” is going to work better than “She won’t oblige us by supporting stuff that isn’t going to happen”. Anyway, I’d guess it would work better.
I share my candidate’s attitude about the emails, Eric: I don’t give a damn about them.
“She’s reckless with critical national secrets” might work better if there were an iota of evidence that she was reckless with critical national secrets, but there is none yet, and I’m guessing that there never will be.