Bill and Hillary themselves are matchless fighters, and the singular genius of their first eight-year reign was to enlist their supporters as partisan spectators to their fights: against Gennifer Flowers, against Pentagon brass who forced them into "Don't ask, don't tell", against "Harry and Sally", against Newt Gingrich, against the undeserving poor, against gay-baiters who forced them into the Defense of Marriage Act, against Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, against Ken Starr and "the vast right-wing conspiracy." Meanwhile, the spectators themselves became punching bags, but so thoroughly had they been corralled into the Clintons' bleachers that it was as if they could do nothing but take it, perhaps raising a squeak of protest briefly, before turning back to the main event, cheering on their friends, oppressors, friends, the Clintons.
After Hillary won Ohio, having beaten up Obama on NAFTA, a real estate deal and the danger an Obama presidency would pose to sleeping children, the two obvious questions were how did she manage to turn NAFTA into a negative for him, and why didn't he fight back quicker, harder, more effectively? The same might be asked of Ohio itself, and everything Ohio represents, across the long decline of wages and jobs and manufacturing to the present state of social insecurity for which "NAFTA" has become shorthand. For the plain fact is that until the anarchists rose up in Seattle, along with better behaved opponents of neoliberal globalization, shutting down the WTO meeting in the twilight of the Clinton years, no one fought at all except the right.
(...)
But the larger point is how they got away with it. The prison population and prison labor (engaged in everything from taking reservations to sewing jeans to building furniture and transmissions for pennies an hour) mushroomed under Clinton's three-strikes-you're-out and kindred crime policies, and organized labor didn't fight. Prisons expanded, and organized labor didn't fight. (To the extent that more cops and more prison guards and more construction crews were real or potential union members, this development was sometimes even welcomed.) Privatization moved apace here as in so many other sectors, and organized labor didn't fight. The prisons filled with young black and Latino men, and black leadership didn't fight, Latino leadership didn't fight, the civil rights movements didn't fight -- not in any robust, sustained and visible fashion, just like the unions with job loss, NAFTA and the decline in real wages. Now one in less than 100 adult Americans is locked up. That was a blip in the news during the campaigns in Ohio and Texas. Hillary Clinton called for even more cops on the streets, more community policing and only lastly a review of sentencing.
I don't know if Obama, then struggling to defend himself as someone who would not allow America's sleeping children to be slaughtered by foreigners, said anything at all. But there was no popular outcry he might have ridden or been pressured by, no mass organized black or Latino outcry, just as there had been none during the Clinton reign. Critics say Obama is isolated because he's maintained a careful distance from black leadership, and that is true, except that that leadership has allowed its children to be criminalized and locked up, and all the while cheered for Bill, rustled votes for Bill, just plain liked Bill, and in many cases signed on early to his wife's campaign without making mass incarceration an issue. Prisons have been the only real growth industry in Ohio's Mahoning County, home of Youngstown and its supposed population of fighters, and the county went 64 percent for Hillary on March 4.
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