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Hilary Clinton's New Progressive Alignment
A devilishly shrewd idea emerged during the past few weeks from Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. Rather than argue that her left-wing rival, Bernie Sanders, is simply too radical to be President, as she did at first, Clinton has decided to insist instead that the Vermonter is not progressive enough. Because Sanders has for decades been the only national political figure willing to call himself a socialist, this strategy at first seemed either strange or cynical. But it has been gathering momentum, first when Sanders struggled to defend his record on gun control and then when Chelsea Clinton, the once and perhaps future First Daughter, gave a pointed speech arguing that Sanders’s insistence on “dismantling” Obamacare to build a more radical health-insurance program would, effectively, “strip millions and millions of people of their health insurance.” In the debate last night, this tactic looked clearer, and more effective, than it had before. Sanders’s ideology is an imperfect fit with the institutional progressivism that Democratic primary voters have spent years working for; perhaps, in certain ways, it even undermines it. Clinton’s bet is that the political compass for her party’s primary voters does not point true left, to the Scandinavian social projects that Sanders so admires, but to the tangible gains that Democrats have won. She came to praise Barack Obama. Norway be damned.
...
Who does Sanders think is a hero, anyway? Though he praised the examples of Truman and Roosevelt, he used the word only once yesterday, referring not to a progressive political giant nor to ordinary American people but, improbably, to King Abdullah, of Jordan, “one of the very few heroes in an unheroic place,” the Middle East. Abdullah is a complicated and fascinating figure and a longtime U.S. ally; there is a case to be made for him. He is also a monarch who has maintained a secret police and limits on freedom of expression and democracy in Jordan, who was a target rather than an ally of the Arab Spring. Late to foreign policy, unpracticed in it, Sanders emphasized the generational horror of ISIS and argued for working with unseemly regimes to defeat it: Russia, Iran. There was an unexpectedly pragmatic tone. In this, as in much else, Sanders didn’t sound like the progressives to whom liberal American voters have long been accustomed. He sounded more difficult to fathom.
...
Political legacies are specific things. The 2016 Democratic convention will be held, in July, at the Wells Fargo Center, in Philadelphia. King Abdullah will not walk on to that stage to be adored and to celebrate the nominee. Neither will Truman or Roosevelt. But Barack Obama will.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hillary-clintons-new-progressive-alignment
...
Who does Sanders think is a hero, anyway? Though he praised the examples of Truman and Roosevelt, he used the word only once yesterday, referring not to a progressive political giant nor to ordinary American people but, improbably, to King Abdullah, of Jordan, “one of the very few heroes in an unheroic place,” the Middle East. Abdullah is a complicated and fascinating figure and a longtime U.S. ally; there is a case to be made for him. He is also a monarch who has maintained a secret police and limits on freedom of expression and democracy in Jordan, who was a target rather than an ally of the Arab Spring. Late to foreign policy, unpracticed in it, Sanders emphasized the generational horror of ISIS and argued for working with unseemly regimes to defeat it: Russia, Iran. There was an unexpectedly pragmatic tone. In this, as in much else, Sanders didn’t sound like the progressives to whom liberal American voters have long been accustomed. He sounded more difficult to fathom.
...
Political legacies are specific things. The 2016 Democratic convention will be held, in July, at the Wells Fargo Center, in Philadelphia. King Abdullah will not walk on to that stage to be adored and to celebrate the nominee. Neither will Truman or Roosevelt. But Barack Obama will.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hillary-clintons-new-progressive-alignment
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We need more love in this country and less anger.
Let's all be positive.
