Dealing the Woman’s Card—Clinton’s. And Mine. And Dealing the Man’s Card—Bernie Sanders’s. And Donald Trump’s.
There are limits to the analogy between Clinton’s 2008 primary contest with Obama and Sanders’s primary contest now with her. Clinton doesn’t get that. But she needs to figure it out because the differences matter.
— There are limits to the analogy between Clinton’s 2008 primary contest with Obama and Sanders’s primary contest now with her. Clinton doesn’t get that. But she needs to figure it out because the differences matter., Me, Angry Bear, yesterday
Later yesterday I posted a short follow-up, saying:
When I wrote this post today I wasn’t aware of this piece by Jonathan Cohn (a longtime favorite of mine, dating to his time at The New Republic). It was published early this morning but I just learned of it (h/t Paul Waldman). But it makes the same key point that I do in mine.
Which is that Sanders supporters will know that their vote for Clinton in November will mean something much more than just a vote for Clinton or a vote against Trump. Most of us will be out en force on election day, voting not because of Clinton but because of Sanders. And voting, really, not for Clinton but for Sanders. As well as for progressives in the down-ballot contests.
The movement has taken hold.
Which managed to garner some attention to my first post, since I’d linked to it, and spurred the following in the comments thread to it this morning:
Beene
April 28, 2016 7:57 am
People if you take nothing else from the above article. Except that change is possible if you help Bernie and Warren when they ask for help for explicit people; reform of the democratic party is possible.
If you believe that the common belongs to the nation and those who benefit should be taxed according to assistance they have received as a member of this nation. But, dino’s like the Clintons’ or Obama are no better than having a republican, as the goal is not the common good.
EMichael
April 28, 2016 9:26 am
” But, dino’s like the Clintons’ or Obama are no better than having a republician, as the goal is not the common good.”
It is hard to imagine the stupidity required to write that sentence.
Prompting this lengthy comment from me:
You know what’s sort of funny to me about this thread? I had forgotten this until this weeks’ Woman’s Card contretemps—specifically Clinton’s “Deal me in” response to Trump—reminded me of it. Clinton responded with something like “If equal pay, and guaranteed paid family leave, and affordable preschool, and women’s healthcare are playing the Woman’s Card, deal me in.” Ah; then I remembered the moment when I concluded that Clinton really DOESN’T have a core, or much of one anyway: When at the first debate last fall, after Sanders mentioned his proposal to tax everyone’s income at (I think) $1.54/a week (it was well less than $2.00) to pay for guaranteed paid medical and family leave, Clinton used, for the first of many times during the fall and very early this year, her rebuttal line that she wants to raise middle-class incomes, not lower them.
Until that moment I had thought that the one thing that really WAS her core politically was the panoply of traditional women’s issues, including guaranteed paid family leave. Guess I was wrong about that, I said to myself. So, apparently, did a good swath of other progressives.
She was raked over the coals for that—a stunning, dumbfounding comment from a Democratic candidate for president—yet she kept repeating it until the polls showed Sanders effectively even with her in Iowa and leading her in New Hampshire. I remember the dismay and anger from commentators and others. Several pointed out that that comment was straight from the Republican Party playbook. And that apparently Clinton thinks FDR and LBJ wanted to lower incomes because, well … Social Security and Medicare.
Clinton thinks her problem in not being a natural politician is simply that she’s cold and stiff in her physical presence and speaking style. She doesn’t recognize—and either do her campaign folks her feed her these sound bite lines she adopts—that her biggest problem, by far, is fondness for sound bites that are actually appalling. Her husband raised taxes. Guess he wanted to lower incomes rather than raise them.
I’ve debated here in AB threads several times with people who disagree with me that Clinton simply is not very bright. That she’s so fond of this kind of thing—the asinine, self-defeating sound bites and sleights of hand that have been a hallmark of her campaign—is what I’m talking about.
NYT columnist Charles Blow has a good column today in which he calls Clinton a waffling contrivance. Perfect!
But all that said, the bottom line is that EMichael is, extremely obviously, exactly right. Why would anyone who is appalled by Citizens United and the Voting Rights Act opinion—two Supreme Court opinions that, unlike most of their other truly awful ones, most ARE aware of—think the outcome of the election between Trump and Clinton doesn’t matter?
I know that most people have no clue that most of the really important stuff that happens in federal courts happens at the district court (trial court) and circuit court (appellate court) levels. Much less do they know the genuinely appalling effect of the complete takeover of the entire civil and criminal justice systems, state and federal, by the Conservative Legal Movement. Even less do they know the extraordinary breadth and reach of what this has affected.
Nor do they know that, finally—finally—in the last three years, thanks mostly to the decision by Harry Reid to kill the filibuster for circuit and district court nominees, the makeup of those courts has changed significantly and VERY meaningfully.
So, yeah, I repeat what EMichael said:
“”But, dino’s like the Clintons’ or Obama are no better than having a republician, as the goal is not the common good.”
“It is hard to imagine the stupidity required to write that sentence.”
Indeed.
Indeed.
I’m a Card Carrying Woman, but I prefer Sanders’s Man’s Card to Clinton’s Woman’s Card. And Clinton’s Woman’s Card to this: Trump’s fiscal, healthcare and environmental positions will be drafted by the Club for Growth and the Koch brothers’-sponsored so-called think tanks and lobbyists. Just as his actual policy proposals published on his campaign’s website were.
____
UPDATE: Greg Sargent has an up-to-date summary of efforts at a Clinton/Sanders rapprochement.
And Alexandra Petri discusses her own Woman’s Card. Hilariously.
I think the scariest part about this primary(with all the good done by Sanders) is that many of his supporters are the Green Lanterns that have plagued the Democratic Party as long as the “neoliberal”(I hate that word) part has plagued the Democratic Party.
Certainly not all of the Sanders supporters are like these people, but they make the most noise. They are the ones I call BernieBros. They are not helpful to Sanders, and certainly not helpful to the Democratic Party.
And the reason they exist at all is their ignorance of how things are determined by the Constitution. They do not understand the significance of, and/or they cannot count; to 5; to 51; to 60; to 218; or to 270. They combine those traits with the refusal to understand that there is no possibility of change in the US without working inside either the Democratic or Republican parties.
Unless you bring guns.
And bigger guns than the government has — which, since that will never happen, means the revolution can only mean 80% turnouts for elections instead of 35%, which would bring the current Republican Party to an end. With full citizen engagement, Obama would be the center of the revived Republican Party, and Sanders would be somewhat left-of-center in the Democratic Party. Clinton then would be happy to transition to a Medicare-for-All system. Maybe it’s not as exciting as barricades in the streets, but that could be described legitimately as a revolution.
Ehh?, higher turnout sounds great and certainly would be desirable, but I am not sure it would change the percentages that much.
Sanders has the chance to drag the Democratic Party to the left in a meaningful way. His demonstration of raising money for his goals means that the possibility exists that the Party can stop taking big cash from corps. That can only help.
Course, not many people try to remember how that lack of corp money gave us Nixon, Reagan and Bush I and, if not for Watergate would have given us Ford. And without the cash Bush 1 would have been a two termer.
But there is a way out of that need, and the resulting power could get us to get rid of Citizen United.
All good things if Sanders keeps walking the walk.
Obviously turnout is not going to change that much in the short run. But percentages like that should be the express and unwavering goal of the progressive organizations. They should be focusing more of their resources on the long-game process of achieving turnouts like that, because it’s easily the most progressive thing they can do.
Where does stuff like this “no core” nonsense come from? Does Bernie not have a core because he voted for the Crime Bill of 1994, and voted against some gun control measures supported by almost every Democrat (and Clinton)? Did the 70% of New Yorkers who re-elected her to the Senate in 2006 think she had no core? Did the liberal Americans for Democratic Action somehow tip us off secretly that her 95% or 100% support for the measures they thought most important when she was a Senator was somehow less sincere or more hollow than similar percentages for, say, Senator Sanders or Senator Stabenow? How about the 80% of black voters who have preferred her in these primaries? Do they think she has no core, or do they just not realize how ignorant they are? Do you have no core because you think trying to go to single payer right now would be a stupid idea — which it would be, since it would consume all the oxygen available for more immediately needed efforts like income inequality-fighting measures such as higher minimum wage, major infrastructure spending and card-check unionization rights, or ACA-improvement legislation like a public option? Does one have no core because in order to get the crime control provisions desired like the assault weapons ban, the Violence Against Women Act and community policing, you have to accede to demands by Republicans for stiffer sentences for drug crimes and more prisons? Does one have no core because one votes to give the President authorization to go to war in order to induce Saddam Hussein to let the UN weapons inspection team back into the country, which vote worked exactly as intended because the UN team was allowed back in (but the spirit and intent of the resolution was broken by the administration when war was started before the inspection team could finish its work and declare there were no WMDs)?
If the women’s card makes you forget neocon warmongering and voting for Iraq, you may need to think.
If the women’s card lets you ignore neo liberal scamming and wall st firsters, you are not liberal.
If the women’s card is enough to differentiate Clinton from Cruz…….
I do not buy the meme that voting any dino in any post is a progressive thing.
U/L of course Clionton has a core, it is rotten.
Clinton did not vote to force Saddam to do anything about an insane charge he has anything beyond bug gas, she voted for AUMF open ended war in the middle east and/or where ever some intel dog says there is a Muslim angry at you and me. If she claims different it is a shading her core thing. She’s had a neocon bent for years.
The rest of her core is money in M’s planned parenthood and in the T’s for wall st!
The rest of your “points” are Clinton speak!
Em….
Green Lanterns.
I watch Big Bang Theory on syndication all the time!
I call you Sheldon from now on!
So, Ilsm, planning to vote this time around?
Thou there has been some critics of my statement (But, dino’s like the Clintons’ or Obama are no better than having a republican, as the goal is not the common good.) I stand by it. For it is austerity imposed by the economic policies on the right and left following the dictates of the Federal Reserve, that have led to the present popularity of Bernie and Trump.
Remembering there were no fear of inflation or the bond gods when we spent trillions on buying the gambling houses of Wall Street out of the mess the Federal Reserve and Wall Street created. It seems only when we want to spend on creating jobs or opportunity for jobs there is an outcry about inflation from the Federal Reserve.
Clinton is one of the neocon hipocrats that will take any big money to do nothing. She does have many old sounding sound bites and likes to use them regularly. She has thus far fooled a large part of the electorate into thinking that she is what they need. She has skillfully managed to cover her trail of flip flopping on issues and deception of policy to cover her many past political errors. I would not be surprised if she has taken money from the Koch brothers. I do not understand how she has been so successful at fooling so many people…
Look, Clinton is centrist/centrist-left. More centrist than centrist-left. But no centrist, much less a center-leftist, should say–ever–that very small dedicated payroll tax that applies to everyone, or a small income tax that applies to the middle class, that pays for something as important to the middle class and the working class as guaranteed paid medical and family leave is out-of-bounds because, after all, it’s a TAX.
It not only fell like a lead balloon on its own terms; it also played a large role in causing the revulsion a LOT of progressives have developed toward Clinton in the last year and played a role in their belief that Clinton is casually and fundamentally dishonest.
That REALLY MATTERS. And it just really galls me, and I’m betting, a lot of other Sanders supporters that the cadre of baby boomer progressive NYT columnists and the like claim that those of us who think Clinton is dishonest have been conned by the Republican anti-Hillary juggernaut. We haven’t. We’ve just watched Clinton herself over the last year.
Beene,
There was never a doubt in my mind you would stand behind your statement.
JackD,
Voting for change this time!