This is a reply to Nippersdad who thinks he knows my life better than I do.
1.) Just because a term is used by political scientists in a certain way doesn’t mean that it will continue to be defined in the way it was intended. I think what you refer to as “corporatist” was called “fascism” in my day. This term has gotten away from those of you who coined it to mean a specific thing. Now it means any corporation that operates for any reason, and anyone who works for them, is evil. No? You know this is true. I went to YearlyKos in Chicago and got my ass handed to me at breakfast after Edwards gave his PT Barnum speech because I worked for a corporation. If people don’t mean to imply that every stakeholder in a corporation is guilty of being evil, heartless human beings, then they should be a lot more careful about how they sling that word around. Whenever I hear it now, I just write the speaker off as the most clueless person on the planet who has no idea how impossible it is to do certain things without the structure of a corporation. Yes, I know you’re going to say that’s not what the word means but I don’t think you are listening to me. That’s what your fanbase is interpreting it to mean and it is hurting people whose employers have pulled up stakes and moved to Chindia, as well as being insulting. Your word, not mine. If it was invented by political science establishment I have to wonder if the intention was to create a faceless, unresponsive enemy onto which people could fecklessly vent their frustrations. Congratulations! It worked and now those of us who work for them have absolutely no allies either within or without. It is a divisive and imprecise word. Stop using it.
2.) We obviously see welfare reform very differently. BTW, I was in college when Reagan came into office. Yes, I was in the first generation of Americans who were severely impacted by the Reagan years. It was under Reagan that Pell grants went under the ax and states started cutting back on funding and when tuition started to rise and when newly divorced mothers couldn’t get any public assistance if they were full time students. Yep, no food stamps, no rental vouchers, no childcare subsidies, nothing. You could only get those things if you were a part time student who also worked. I knew mothers in that situation who struggled more than you will ever know because of Reagan. They could barely feed their families on the lousy money they were getting and the restrictions on the number of classes they could take meant that they stretched out their educations far longer than was necessary or good for them and their families. They were failing in both areas. But that’s what Reagan brought to our national discourse- a meanspirited, hard heartedness where people had permission to look a women with 4 kids in the eye or a first generation student from a working class family and say to them, “What makes you think you are entitled to an education? Who told you that we had to help you get through school?”
I’ve been there, asshole. I’ve had relatives on welfare. They were anything but lazy freeloaders.
I’m the last person in the world who would accuse welfare recipients of being queens as Reagan did. But I also know that if the Clintons had gotten healthcare reform and all of the other welfare reforms, many lives would have been improved beyond description and people who are laid off now, like yours truly, wouldn’t be spending half of our unemployment benefits on COBRA.
As for NAFTA, I will once again reiterate that we are not losing our jobs to Mexico. We are losing them to Asia. Also, when Clinton came into office, the trade deal that was negotiated by Bush Sr. was almost completed. The labor standards were scrapped by Republicans.
Yes, Republicans raised taxes. Let’s see, it was about 1986 when they raised them on late babyboomers such as myself who as a new college graduate was among the first to pre-pay my social security benefits. Yes, Bush Sr raised taxes. IIRC, he wasn’t particularly selective about whose taxes he raised. It was Clinton who specifically raised them on the wealthy and down the road made sure that people on the lower end of the income ladder paid little to nothing. As I recall, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky cast the deciding vote in the House. She was later targeted by the Republicans for removal and she lost her seat.
You give Clinton far too little credit. You continue to ignore the fact that the only two liberal justices on the SC were appointed by him. You ignore all of the work Hillary Clinton did on healthcare reform (not talking about SCHIP) and how she was shot down by members of her own party, some of whom may have been tireless promoters of Barack Obama. You forget about Lani Guinier. You forget that it was Bill Clinton who first announced that he wanted to allow gay soldiers to serve in the military and that he was forced to walk that back by the crazy religious right in the armed forces.
As for the Greens, I hold them partially responsible for the indiscriminate way they have attacked every faulty product as some kind of malicious negligence. As a pharma researcher, I have seen many drugs pulled off the market and companies sued by class action lawfirms who with the aid of somewhat naive federal courts have extorted billions of dollars from company coffers. Oh, they *deserved* that, right? I also know how emails and memos can be distorted and how PR campaigns can demonize and how what looks like an unintended or unknown side effect can permanently injure a company going forward so that it has to cut back on research or is forced into an unwanted merger or acquisition. I’ve seen 20 years of that shit result in the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of scientists whose employers decided to plunder what’s left of the company for the good of the shareholders and reduce costs by shipping our jobs overseas.
I don’t know who the hell you are but you haven’t been reading my blog for very long or you would know that I AM the working class that you are purporting to help. I am the college educated daughter of a military family, the first on either side to go to get a degree. I AM that future social security beneficiary who is going to get screwed. I lived through the Reagan years without the benefit of a family infrastructure who knew anything about higher education. I am that professional worker who got laid off in their middle age and can’t find a job anywhere. I am that person who pays a fortune for health care. I am that person who is currently living on unemployment and my savings. I am that person who worries about losing my house. I am that person who has to put a teenager through college. I am that person who has to deal with a deteriorating school system.
Do not come here from your lofty, detached poli-sci perch and preach to me the meaning of the word corporatist or presume to tell me the history that I lived through. I don’t use labels because I believe that thinking through thoughts without predefined shortcuts is the best way to understand a problem. If you don’t like it, there’s a whole universe of blogs you can visit that will pander to your secret desires to be flattered for your perspicacity and divine wisdom. I doubt you will find that kind of flattery here.
Filed under: General Tagged: | Clinton, COBRA, corporatist, Greens, Nippersdad, pell grants, Social Security, taxes, unemployment, Welfare
Amen sister!
This is great, RD. With this we have a neat template for quick replies to this new generation of Obot Troll. This new troll identity of an uber-lefty promoting anti-Clinton propaganda is starting to show up all over the place.
This must be the version directed to the poor weak-minded women.
This shit never stops. If it’s not the absolutely batshit insane Republicans trying to beat us down it is the people who are *supposed* to be on our own side who are either fucking clueless or political operatives who have no idea how the real working class lives. And I’m not talking about forklift drivers and waitresses alone. I’m talking about college educated, middle class people who are being decimated by this depression and are getting *zero* assistance from Obama and the Democrats.
How dare they come onto this blog and presume to tell me that my perceptions of the problem are all wrong and everything bad that has every happened in the past 30 years is Clinton’s fault.
The Democrats are going to lose if they continue to ignore my demographic and pretend that we don’t have real problems. Back in 2008, we wanted Clinton for very good, legitimate reasons.
I was working as a waitress in the early eighties and Reagan raised my taxes and I had to beg my father for help.
Clinton raised taxes on the people who could afford it.
I don’t know who the hell Nippersdad is but he might be a fan of the Thom Hartmann radio show because that fool thinks everything bad is Bill Clinton’s fault. Obama/Dr. Drones, of course, can do no wrong, which is really funny because Obama makes Clinton look like FDR.
(Off Topic) Could we use volcanos to incinerate trash?
If by trash you mean most of the Democratic pols we are saddled with …?
Actually I was thinking about the plastic island off the coast of Hawaii. Loading bundles and dropping them out of helicopters
Are you referring to the huge zone of floating plastic that I have heard about on radio programs? Or is there a more discrete Island of
compacted floating garbage off Hawaii in particular?
There are 2 of them now. And I think one in the Atlantic.
If we are thinking of the same zones, the problem is that what they are is trillions of tiny little plastic chips and bits loosely floating in the top few feet of over a million square mile area of ocean water. Many of them are apparently small or smaller than those tiny cardboard squares that were punched out of computer punchcards . . . back when computers had punchcards. (Do I date myself?) How to round all those up?
An article I read on Colonel (Ret.) Pat Lang’s “sisterblog” called The Atheneum about a kind of marine invertebrate called salps might offer some hope for rounding up these diffusely scattered trillions of bits of plastic. Once the bits get small enough to be confused for plankton, the salps might ingest them along with the plankton and poo them back out in fecal pellets which are heavy enough to sink to the ocean floor. If one could fertilize the garbage-island-zone ocean surface with the right minerals needed to stimulate the right phytoplankton to feed the right zooplankton needed to subsidise the vast increase of salp numbers needed to eat up the plastic along with the plankton –and poo it out the back end — then one could slowly displace the plastic problem to the deep ocean floor. Of course if we don’t stop putting fresh plastic into the ocean, then what would be the point? Still . . .
here is the article which made me think about this.
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/2012/04/strength-in-numbers-the-mighty-salp.html
Raygun’s most ruinous move was the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, followed by the PATCO busting. I was a working a full-time and two part-time jobs by the time the Great Communicator left the stage and I still couldn’t rub two nickels together, I recall students who were faced with the choice of paying for text books or paying the power bill. The only Happy Days were for the 1% because they could see the beginning of the greatest wealth transfer in history.
agree with:
“most ruinous move was the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine”
Oh,I love the post but I wanted to backtrack to Nippersdad. From whence came his comment?
It came from the Garry Wills thread.
Found it. One of the best exchanges I’ve ever read. Of course, I agree with your positions, and I, for one, am still beating the drum for SOS Clinton, though I realize my wishes and hopes have a near zero chance of materializing.
http://madinthemiddle.blogspot.com/2012/06/sos-clinton-for-potus.html
forgot it.
It looks to me like where Nippersdad went wrongest was in trying to tell you what you should be writing on your blog for the good of the reading masses. Had he stopped at making his own case vigorously several different ways against your rebuttal several different ways . . . and left it at that for the readers to sort out . . . he would have been “at balance” if not quite quitting while ahead. (If I am wrong about that , I imagine I may be corrected myself).
Great rant, RD! Sometimes you just have to let the idiots have it with both barrels, and that was an exemplary job.
Nippersdad’s response to Riversdaughter:
1. I somehow do not find myself feeling in the least guilty about the ignorance of others. Sorry you had your ass handed to you at yearly kos, but that really has no bearing on my point; that you took it for common knowledge does. I can assure you that my “fan base” is not and never was at D Kos. I have the banning to prove it. Had I a “fan base”, I feel assured that they would not require such as myself to define perfectly adequate terminologies. I expect that everyone can use a dictionary these days, at the very least.
2. Thanks for calling me an asshole. Had you read my point about him you might have noticed that he was only referenced with regard to movement conservatives, I was not agreeing with the guy. But thanks for playing fairly.
In the here and now, I deal with kids working their way through the juvenile justice system learning new ways to cook the poke salad that they find whilst picking up trash by the side of the road (for community service hours and profit!) while their parent(s) are working ;their third part time job. But I’m glad to hear what an expert you are on the poor here. Clearly you would be better suited to giving them advice and direction than I.
3. That we have not lost jobs to Mexico would come as a real surprise to all of those who were working in the new car plants that were built down there after the Bill passed. That many of the manufacturers who had located down there for the lower costs then moved on to Asia has been something that one can look up, as can the numbers of jobs moved offshore due to the trade models that NAFTA mainstreamed. The point that I apparently failed to make was that normalizing the offshoring of jobs was not a liberal position. I apologize that I was unable to make you understand that. MFNTS for China, if I recall, was not on the Democratic platform, so I thought that you might have noticed that such things were frowned upon by the hoi polloi at the time. My bad.
Oh, and btw, the trade standards you reference were in a separate Bill called the Fair Trade Bill, which was never presented for a vote.
4. Blah blah blah. Sorry to have said anything now. I have enjoyed your discussions of the problems in the pharmaceutical industry; they were helpful background for understanding my Brother in law’s plight with regard to his position at Merck. You claim to be the working class, but I really don’t see it. There is a real difference between mothers who listen through their kids doors whilst they are on line to determine the quality of their interactive coursework and those who must clean a Denny’s bathroom to pay the rent on their trailer while their kid is up on charges of drug possession and car theft while truant at school. Even with all of your efforts, you do not seem to know much about those of whom you speak so disparagingly…plus, you strike me as thin skinned and arrogant.
Your choices, and you have the privilege of having to live with them.
Like I care what you think.
But there is one thing that you are very wrong about. I AM working class, just like anyone who doesn’t make their income off their investments.
What’s arrogant is presuming that trailer park dwellers whose kids are on drugs are representative of the working class. That tells me all I need to know about you.
And you’re not from around here. Americans don’t use “whilst”. You’re either a Brit or you use an affectation that you think will impress people.
I worked my way up. You were likely born there and have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
‘git.
I agree, working class is not just blue collar. Auto workers in the early 70′s made better buck [inflation adjusted] than many engineers and science professions today. Plus, they had longer terms of employment and didn’t have to relocate every 2-3 years.
At the time, did engineers feel themselves to be aBOVE the WORking class because as engineers, they were proFESSional and they got a SALary and so forth? Not a mere wage, like those union guys?
Or am I severely generalizing from what one particular Ford engineer’s son told me once some years ago?
Absolutely, I tried to get an Engineers union to affiliate with a machinist union so that if they struck, they would shutdown production/revenue.
Most engineers agreed it was the way to go but about 30% held class based hatred and repeated show up at meetings, shouted speakers down and threatened to have engineers fired + the local machinist union bosses said they would not lift a finger [and in fact, they ratted me out to the company thugs].
Result? The longest engineers strike in history…they went back to work for less than the original offer. I left the company long before, but in fairness to the national machinist organization, they did call about a year later, after they heard the story and in a round about way apologized.
While it’s an easy call for me to say Hillary would have been more “liberal” than Obama, who was/is after all, an extreme right wing [ERW] candidate. I can also say that neither Hill, nor Bill are anything approaching liberal.
Both Bill & Hill are ERW when it comes to the Financial sector, both want a return to 19th century economics…sans a mercantilist policy that would protect American workers from predatory mercantilist nations.
Both Bill & Hill are ERW when it comes to foreign interventionist wars, both have supported Obama’s warmongering in Libya, Honduras and now Syria. Although, to be fair, Obama has a real blood lust for killing people and that appears to be sociopathic in nature, as opposed to Bill & Hill’s which is some form of misguided real-politic.
The difference between Bill & Hill vs. Obama lies largely in the area of progressive taxation, preserving Social Security, a public role in Health Care insurance and protecting the upper middle class…although both Bill, Hill & Obama do agree that skilled workers, the working class and their offspring working in science/technology needs to be ground into the dust of the international coliseum.
Al Gore on the other hand, was anti-war, certifiably liberal on economics, progressive taxation, preserving Social Security, a public role in Health Care insurance and a nationalist on protecting American Industries/workers from other nations engaging buccaneering mercantilism. Anybody who said there was no difference between Al Gore and Bush [the 2nd] was either a Republican operative, a Nader Nut* a 2004 supporter of a candidate to be…or some from of didactic “pseudo- liberal” intending to show their moral superiority to the great unwashed masses.
This last group is the one that destroyed the Democratic party in the 1970′s…and they are still around, as Dem leaders…and as little people writing on these blogs. Just yesterday on Naked Capitalism a uber-liberal fellow blamed the unions for extending the Viet Nam war and thus justified his hatred of union members and working class people in general. And the party keeps losing in spite of having demographics that keeps shifting in it’s favor…because the folks running the party hate working class people [in all their forms].
When Republican leaders use the term limousine liberals, they know what they are doing, they are reminding working folks that the Democratic party no longer champions FDR’s policies, it has abandoned the working class for a coalition of special interests…to which working people DO NOT BELONG!
*Anybody who has never held public office [or any other position of authority] and runs for the office of President 6 times and leaves nothing, [and I mean nothing] behind…is an asshole, [not misguided, not foolish, not stupid], an asshole.
Has the whole world gone mad?? Where the hell did you come up with the idea that the Clintons want to take us back to 19th century working conditions or are bloody hawks on foreign policy? BTW, you are never going to find a president who at some point in his/her career is going to be able to avoid using the military. But I don’t see either Clinton as being as hawkish as the Bushies or as callous as Obama.
Somewhere, there is a graph of where recent presidents fall on the liberal conservative spectrum. Bill Clinton scores in the same range as JFK and only Jimmy Carter is more liberal. Barack Obama is definitely on the conservative side of the spectrum. That’s based on legislation that they fought for and signed.
But hell, let’s just ignore all of the facts and believe whatever we’re told. Forget looking at the records.
I like Al Gore and I voted for him. But I don’t see him as more or less liberal than Clinton.
I radically disagreed with that graph on JFK and LBJ. The guy was uber hawkish and did little to nothing on Civil Rights, and was, as proven by Jackie Kennedy’s recently released tapes and recently released confidential memos on the Civil Rights movement , significantly more racist than LBJ. LBJ and JFK should be flipped if you look at actual actions and legislation. LBJ was considering getting out Vietnam in 1964, something that JFK ramped up over the relative low key involvement Eisenhower had. LBJ was convinced by Kennedy’s uber hawkish cabinet member to stay in Vietnam. JFK is way overblown, the real JFK reminds me way too much of Obama… My Irish Catholic Democratic step grandfather from New York was the first Democrat I knew who, who decidedly did not buy into the Kennedy mystique and rightly credited LBJ with doing all the real work. LBJ gets trashed just like all the other liberal leaning southern democratic presidents of my lifetime (I was born 1966) by the northern dominated news media elitists, including the fauxgressives.
I am stunned– someone who agrees with a thought I’ve been voicing for years. Re as one example: if the Kennedys were so liberal then why did Ted try so hard to undermine Jimmy Carter? So Ciardha, I’m with you on the JFK/LBJ point for sure.
I agree with this point:
“why did Ted try so hard to undermine Jimmy Carter?”
If fact I address the Kennedy crowd here:
[quoting myself]
“…a Nader Nut*…or some from of didactic “pseudo- liberal” intending to show their moral superiority to the great unwashed masses.
This last group is the one that destroyed the Democratic party in the 1970′s…and they are still around, as Dem leaders…and as little people writing on these blogs. Just yesterday on Naked Capitalism a uber-liberal fellow blamed the unions for extending the Viet Nam war and thus justified his hatred of union members and working class people in general. And the party keeps losing in spite of having demographics that keeps shifting in it’s favor…because the folks running the party hate working class people [in all their forms].
When Republican leaders use the term limousine liberals, they know what they are doing, they are reminding working folks that the Democratic party no longer champions FDR’s policies, it has abandoned the working class for a coalition of special interests…to which working people DO NOT BELONG!
*Anybody who has never held public office [or any other position of authority] and runs for the office of President 6 times and leaves nothing, [and I mean nothing] behind…is an asshole, [not misguided, not foolish, not stupid], an asshole.”
Let me add, that anybody who says the Iraq Invasion and Viet Nam were the moral equivalent doesn’t know history. There really was a Soviet build up in the Indochine region. It was a massive build-up in the middle of the cold war and the Soviets were in the habit of invading countries. The fear of the Soviets was justified. I will not ague that our response was the right one…history says otherwise, but seen in context, understandable. Iraq was weak, alone and a threat to no one, to compare the two immoralities at any level is as wrong as the invasion itself, it’s like comparing a auto accident in bad weather to a murder.
About Teddy and Carter, I felt like Teddy’s moves were based on pride and spite. “I! am the Liberal around here! Who does this Carter-person think he is?” On there other hand, and there often is another hand, didn’t TKennedy get some rather good liberal legislation through the Senate?
Revelations of Kennedy’s private racism are disappointing. We know that RFK authorised FBI wiretaps against Dr. MLK. And LBJ believed in civil rights/voting rights in a way that Kennedy never seemed to. But about Vietnam . . . I have/had read that Kennedy ramped up the unconventional/special forces — Green Beret side of intervention partly as a test bed for these application of force concepts. He quickly came to see what a ‘loser’ Vietnam was going to be and had every intention of winding it up and cutting it loose upon re-election. The Military Industrial Complex saw itself faced with the shutdown of what it expected would be a tremendous goldmine for itself and they (among others) quietly pressed to have Kennedy assassinated to make sure their Vietnam War goldmine went into full operation. And whatever LBJ may be said to have thought, he directed the staging and misrepresentation of the so-called Tonkin Gulf Incident to get his Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed. This was the tragedy of LBJs administration, given that LBJ wanted to put the social capstone (The Great Society) on the achievements of the Square Deal-New Deal-Fair Deal cumulative achievements of the prior 80 years.
So who shot John? Or rather, who contracted to have it done? Well, there are theories. Retired Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty has done some extensive work on this and other subjects. I have two of his books somewhere in my coalbed bookpiles. Here is his website.
http://www.prouty.org/ Fellow readers can strap on their tinfoil crash helmets and do some real thinking about these things. Or , those who are willing to settle for less can accept the Establishment Line put out by people like the Warren Commission and sanctified by Establishment Certified Gatekeeper Leftists like Noam Chomsky.
Oswald diddit. Acting alone. Chomsky agrees. And if Chomsky agrees, it must be right . . . right?
yup, remember when Hillary tried to give LBJ credit for the civil rights legislation? I thought Ted Kennedy was going to take out a contract on her. BTW she was right.
I will agree with you that Gore is more liberal than Bill Clinton. But agree with RD on what she said about the relative place of presidents on the right left line.
Here’s where you lose me…HILLARY CLINTON IS NOT BILL CLINTON. SHE IS AN ACTUAL WHOLE SEPARATE HUMAN BEING. If you had paid any attention to her rather than the people defining her you would know many of the differences between her and Bill and many of the ways in which she would have been superior to Obama.
I am guessing you supported Obama or Edwards and then Obama and now have buyers remorse, but tell yourself that “oh well, Hillary would have been the same”.
I agree with “…HILLARY CLINTON IS NOT BILL CLINTON. SHE IS AN ACTUAL WHOLE SEPARATE HUMAN BEING”.
Hill is worse [ERW] when it comes to abuse of the USA’s Military/NSA capabilities, see supporting Obama’s interventionist wars…Libya, Honduras and now Syria.
Bill is worse [ERW] on economic issues see the criminal activities of Rubin & Summers.
If you take the worst of Bill & Hill and add them together you still don’t have fraction of the manifest evil that is Obama. Both Bill & Hill would not have a criminal [and political hack], who partook in the financial fleecing of the US taxpayers as AG. Neither would have Geithner, Rubin & Summers back/in their Administration…the list goes on.
But to say somebody is better than the tragedy that is the Bush/Obama Administration [the singular form is not an oversight] is low praise indeed. I deserve and have seen much better as a US citizen than the cesspool that is the DC/Wall Street nexus.
On the particular subject of Libya, I suspect it was Sarkozi(France) and Berlusconi(Italy) who pressed first and hardest for some kind of NATO intervention to stop the initially-successful-looking Quadaffi forces from retaking Tripoli. My understanding is that Europe and especially Italy dreaded the thought of a half-million or more Libyan refugees mass-fleeing into Southern Europe in order to escape Quaddafi’s vengeance.
Oh, I have been using one name only on blogs for over ten years…I’ve been commenting about Obama since 2003. See if you can find ONE positive comment I’ve EVER made about Barak, trust me you won’t.
The closest I’ve come supporting Obama, is making fun of his 2004 Senate opponent Alan Keyes to a Newsweek editor that was a big “Obama for President” supporter being treated for Cancer back in 2003.
And yes, big money was fluffing him back then.
One normally-repressed memory which sometimes resurfaces with great attendant pain is Gore’s firm support for NAFTA. “Say it ain’t so, Al!” But it was so.
I remember that Ross Perot was about the most famous person making a stink about the upcoming NAFTA agreement and was rallying
opposition to it to an effectiveness-level such that the Clinton Administration felt it had to respond where mainstream America would hear and see the response. The venue chosen was a TV debate between Perot(kill NAFTA) and Gore(pass NAFTA). I remember during the run-up to that debate an article in Atlantic Monthly saying that Gore was a much better debater than Perot, and much more cold and ruthless in debate than Perot or anyone else had any idea. The cover was an artist’s rendering of Al Gore in a vampire suit and thinly smiling with two little fangs visible . . . a sort of Bela LuGoresi figure.
Well! . . . come the debate, and Perot barely held his own, sorta kinda . . . and then Gore mentioned in detail all about a multi-million dollar property Perot had bought in Mexico and developed to be a transportation-yard-hub-transhipment-reshipment staging area for made-in-Mexico goods into America. Gore beat Perot up, down, and all around with that little tire iron and made Perot look like every kind of hypocrite. Perot’s perormance just deflated from that point. I suspect Perot lost a lot of the audience right there. I was desperately hoping that Perot would whip out his own Tire Iron of Truth and Justice
and swing it into Gore’s mouth of lies and NAFTA. But it was not to be.
Just recently I read that Perot had bought and developed that property in case NAFTA went through, but he so hated the thought of NAFTA for patriotic reasons that he was prepared to see his whole investment in that property written off as the price of getting NAFTA defeated. How very sad that Perot was not good-enough a debater to make that very point at that very time in that debate. If he had done that . . . been ABle to do that . . . he would have cut Gore’s attack in half and been able to portray Gore as a cold and heartless agent of the International Free Trade Conspiracy against America.
So why does that memory pain me such that I usually repress it most of the time? Because I liked Gore in general and like Gore now for the most part. I appreciate Gore’s support for some environmental advances in some areas, and his mainstreaming of some elementary global warming knowledge and concern to a mass audience and so forth. I voted for Gore in Election 2000. There may have been little difference between the two brand name parties at that time, but there was a big difference between Gore the man and Bush the beast . . . an argument I tried making to some starry eyed young people who had fallen under the influence of preening posturing self-actualization-mongering RepubliGreen Naderite scum.
(One of whom may be reading this very comment at this or some future point).
Oh, and . . . DarpaNet. Let’s don’t forget DarpaNet.
The only reason I hear lately about giving Obama another four years is his SCOTUS nominees. All but the most head up their butt Obot has come to realize he is out for #1 and his 1% cronies in just about everything else.
Yes, I know he threw a bone to the GLBT community by saying agreed with the idea of same gender marriage but it should be up to the states. Gee States Rights, where have I heard that before and what class of people was it applied to?
Think about this, in 2017 when Obama is out of a job who will support him in the manner he’s grown accustom?
I’m sure that for the right nominees to the court Wall Street and Corporate America would be willing to make his life very easy.
It is also important to note that Hillary is not Bill: Hillary (for example) advised her husband NOT to sign the GOP Welfare Bill. It was Al Gore who pushed him to sign it. Yet somehow Gore is considered to the left of Hillary.
When the reality was that Hillary had one of the most liberal voting records in congress. Gore not so much, he gets most of his liberal cred on the environment. Hillary had a more liberal record than even Kuchnich on women and children’s issues. Kuchnich basically got his liberal cred on his anti war record. Hillary had a good record across the board on liberal issues, including the environment, union rights, civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, etc… Her sole moderate range voting record is on defense issues. But she was no more hawkish in her voting record than Obama, Biden, Kerry, Edwards, etc…
The GOP pushed welfare reform in the aftermath of blacks buring Los Angeles in the name of Rodney King while the memories of black looting and buring during the ’60s and ’70s were fresh in everybody’s mind. I believe that if George H. W. Bush or Reagan were president when this was before congress, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society would have been scrapped completly and all federal assistance to the needy ended.
The bill that President Clinton signed has placated the GOP for now but I see a future when further cuts are made so the “job creators” can keep more of their money. Last night Michael Savage devoted a segment of his program to Food Stamp abuse encouraging callers to relate their stories on nationwide radio. He says his phone lines were jammed. Ronald Reagan would have been so happy.
You know what the biggest problem with the Welfare reform episode in the 90s is?
No one seems to remember what really happened.
And at the point, setting the record straight likely won’t make any difference.
that’s fair. I would admit that both Hillary and Gore are more liberal than bill and for different policy positions. They also left the DLC in the dust at different times. Hillary more of a populist, Gore more of an environmentalist. I would have preffered either of them to either of the last two presidents. Obviously!
You can thank the print and broadcast media for Bush the Lesser and the disasters he allowed and now Barack Obama letting Wall Street off the hook. Two Irish-Catholic “journalists” come to mind, one print and one broadcast. I wonder if their CDS isn’t misplaced anger from priest abuse as children.
I’m thinking tweety is one and someone told me once he big problem is that he was not chosen to be Clinton’s press secretary. Knowing what a narcissistic nut case he is that would not surprise me.
Would “Moe-Ron” Dowd be the other?
(My question should have been to Mr. Mike, actually. . . .)
On the subject of the Democratic party’s wholesale abandonment of working people.
“…What the hell ever happened to populism in the Democratic Party?
The recent convergence of setbacks on the left has activists and historians alike pondering anew how the modern Democratic Party has severed its connection to its own history — a tradition that many liberals wrongly imagined was about to spring back to life in the Obama years.
Populism — with its rowdy zeal to brawl against economic elites on behalf of the working classes — was for decades the party’s defining cause.
In language that highlights the tameness of contemporary class warfare, President Franklin D. Roosevelt railed against “economic royalists” and the “forces of organized greed,” and, of his business opponents, he gloated, “I welcome their hatred.”
These days, it’s possible to count on one hand the number of unapologetic populists in the U.S. Senate and, besides Elizabeth Warren, there are few more on the horizon.
For the fighting left, it is a frustrating puzzle. If ever there was a moment for a good, old-fashioned class war, at first blush it seems now should be the time. Yet even after the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, there are few politicians preaching, or practicing, the old-time religion.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77878.html
There are old Democrats who might like to be, but they also want to believe that the anti-workeritic Wall Street Hamilton Project Rubinite leadership of the Party are still in fact “Democrats”, and they don’t want to embarrass the “Democratic” leadership of the Party. I think of people like Senator Harkin and Rep. Kaptur and Rep. Dingell and a few others.
The only closet populists you will find are among those aging not-dead-yet Democrats who opposed each and every Free Trade Agreement as best they could against the pro Free Trade coalition of Republicans and bicoastal Democrats. The “Fair Trade Patriots were mostly from the Rustbelt, but some Southern Democrats were among them. Senator Ernest Hollings (first name right?) of South Carolina comes to mind.
I have to reiterate. HILLARY IS NOT BILL!
Of course, she would have governed differently than better than Obama has. Amongst many things she would not have done is participate in a secret free trade agreement negotiation of the sort that Obama is currently supporting that would allow foreign companies operating in the USA to follow their own third world labor laws that violate American labor law.
Anyone who doubts that Obama is, economically, a rightwing Repbulican corporatist is just dumb.