"The world in which you boast about Henry Kissinger’s support is an all-too-familiar one"

[phantom power]

Scott Lemieux says what I've been trying to get at, but better:

Still, on a visceral level I understand the impulse to see Clinton’s string of gaffes as being even more politically damaging than they are. They’re not just random mistakes. Bringing up Henry Kissinger’s positive evaluation sua sponte, raking in huge speaking fees from unsavory corporate interests while knowing you’re running for president, inventing an alternate history where the Reagans were admirable rather than unimaginably horrible on AIDS — they all reflect her near-complete immersion in a particular bubble of establishment non-wisdom. The world in which you boast about Henry Kissinger’s support is an all-too-familiar one, one in which Joe Scarborough and Mark Halperin are serious political analysts, Fred Hiatt is running a bang-up op-ed page, the world described by and reflected by This Town. And, of course, the massive substantive and political blunders that sank her 2008 campaign — voting to give an overconfident, inept president the authority to invade a country that posed no security threat to the United States, and putting her campaign in the hands on a transparent fraud and incompetent who was highly respected in the Beltway for his conservative pandering and being part of a winning presidential campaign it would have been nearly impossible to lose — also reflect this. Ideologically, she’s moving with the party and his running much more like Obama than her husband, but her instincts always seem aligned with the defensive crouch Democrats were in the 90s, the time in which “liberal” was a dirty word and Democrats felt the need to prove they were adult enough to govern by appealing to the wrong sort of crowd. Sanders has never been part of this bubble, and it really is highly appealing. It will be nice when the 90s in this sense are finally over.

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/03/beyond-the-90s

[PatrickforO]

1. Very nice post.

Assertions of Scott Lemieux ring true.