HRC: The Good, Bad, and Ugly....A Reed in the Wind

[amborin]

Hillary’s strategists are selling competence and experience. “A progressive who gets things done,” she is calling herself.

Scratch a little, however, and there’s precious little evidence of substantial things she actually got done. Googling phrases like “Hillary Clinton’s biggest accomplishments” yields lists that include “most-traveled Secretary of State” and “gave a speech in Geneva standing up for gay rights.”

Hillary’s “achievements” are activities, not accomplishments.

she can’t explain away her conservative record. She’s never met a free trade deal or a war she didn’t like (See Diana Johnstone’s Queen of Chaos for the goods on HRC’s foreign policy blunders); millions of jobs and people are dead as a result.

She says she’s been fighting for progressive causes for years, but when? Where? Even on the micro-bore social “wedge” issues that her husband relied upon as president, she’s in trouble. Gays won’t forget her support of the Defense of Marriage Act. Straights think she’s a reed in the political wind.

But Hillary’s biggest flaw as a candidate isn’t policy. It’s her failure to internalize two truisms of politics.

Number one: Candidates win by projecting an optimistic vision of the future. When she criticizes Bernie Sanders for advocating changes that would be hard to get through Congress and expensive to pay for — free college tuition, Medicare for everybody — she projects a radical pessimism that makes many ask, why not? Why can’t the country that invades everyone, that sent a man to the moon, provide the same social benefits as most other nations?

And number two: Elections aren’t about the candidate. They’re about the people. This goes back to when tribes elected chiefs. Vote for me, and buffalo will rain from the sky! We’ll be fat! Water everywhere! That’s a winning campaign — not, hey, as the first elder from the Whatever Clan to become chief, I’d make tribal history and wouldn’t that be cool.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/05/hillary-clinton-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/

[k8conant]

1. "radical pessimism" yields "Them that has, gets"

when we need to hear the promise of something better than the dismal status quo.

[Live and Learn]

2. K&R nt