Catching Up: Clinton & Bernie.

And now, the Democrats. First, congrats to Hillary Clinton on locking up the Democratic nomination last night. As with Obama in 2008, she basically had it in hand several months ago — Bernie losing Massachusetts on Super Tuesday was an early indicator of trouble, and he was effectively drawing dead by mid-March (after Illinois/Ohio/Missouri.) Nonetheless, taking the pledged delegate lead with big wins in California and New Jersey last night made it official. By any measure, Clinton won fair and square, and with a more decisive lead than Obama in 2008.

As my friend and Columbia colleague Niki Hemmer pointed out, regardless of what you think of Clinton herself, that’s a big effin deal: her nomination represents another step forward in a long struggle for equality and justice in America, one that runs from Abigail Adams’ “Remember the Ladies” to Seneca Falls in 1848 to the battle for suffrage and beyond. (While I harbor some reservations about Clinton, which we’ll get to in a moment — in short, #imwithher, but I really wish #shewasmorewithus — I was tickled to think of how ecstatically Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Grace Abbott, and my other dissertoral compadres would’ve reacted to last night’s news.)

Whatever Clinton’s many faults, it’s long past time we caught up to the rest of the world and elected a woman to our highest office. This isn’t about tokenism: Studies have repeatedly shown that having more women in political office has a salutary impact on politics. When women — 51% of the population, but still only 20% of Congressreach 30% of a governing body, new issues get an airing — issues like women’s health and America’s embarrassing lack of quality work and family policies. So, regardless of my own hesitations about Secretary Clinton, I do think her being our nominee — and, in a few months, our first woman president — will have a positive impact on the country, independent of anything else she accomplishes in office.

All that being said…Margaret Thatcher was a woman too, and look how that turned out. So let’s get to the problems here.

As longtime readers know, I covered Secretary Clinton’s candidacy extensively in 2008, from auspicious beginnings through all the sordid shenanigans that followed. I had hoped she would have run in 2016 as a better, wiser candidate. Alas, people don’t tend to change all that much.

The signs of trouble were there from Clinton’s opening townhall in June 2014, when she came out of the gate arguing, among other things, paid maternity leave is just too gosh darn hard, Edward Snowden pals around with terrorists, I’ll let you know later where I stand on Keystone, I couldn’t come out against Iraq because I heart the troops etc. etc. From the start, Clinton emerged as the same triangulating centrist and unrepentant foreign policy hawk we saw in 2008.

Then, to knock out Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong progressive insurgency, Clinton resorted to many of the same sort of kitchen-sink, whatever-sticks attacks that made her so unappealing in 2008. So, for example, she tried to run on his Left and his Right at the same time: On one hand, she’s the “progressive who gets things done”…but, oh, by the way, single-payer is “never, ever” going to happen. Her campaign declared Bernie’s “tone” was unacceptable, all the while working mightily to slather him in the blood of Sandy Hook kids. (Remember: eight years ago, she was so absurdly pro-gun that Obama was calling her “Annie Oakley.”)

Meanwhile, Clinton publicly embraced Henry Kissinger, who really should be rotting in a jail somewhere, and showed no repentance for her hawkishness in Iraq, Libya, and around the world. (Trump’s disastrous temperament notwithstanding, that bizarre clip of Clinton’s luxuriating in Qaddafi’s demise doesn’t speak highly of hers either. Shades of her calling for Nader’s head back in 2000.) On Israel, she’s established a position to the right of Trump. As noted above, she’s derided single-payer as the Impossible Dream. She’s also now declared that huge campaign finance contributions aren’t in fact corrupting, which blows many progressive arguments against Citizens United out of the water.

In sum, she doesn’t seem particularly progressive for a “progressive that gets things done.” But, of course, we already knew this. It wasn’t like Clinton was any kind of progressive champion during her years in the Senate. Instead, she spent her time trying to criminalize flag-burning and tsk-tsking Grand Theft Auto with Joe Lieberman. (Before that, as we’ve all been reminded throughout this cycle, it was “superpredators” and welfare reform.) And now #we’re (stuck in the middle) #withher.

Moving on, one of the more annoying memes this season has been “zomg Bernie Bros!” — i.e. Clinton surrogates’ continual insistence that Bernie somehow invented Internet trolls, and is at best indifferent to, and at worst malevolently orchestrating, a marauding army of sexists that march under his banner. Firstly, anybody who’s Internetted over the years knows these asshats have been around since the CompuServe days — they’re a ubiquitous cancer of the Web, not a Bernie-inspired battalion. (Trust me, there’s some terribad Clintonistas out there also.) Second, in all honesty, the internecine Democratic fighting this year has been relatively tame compared to 2008, when Mark Penn was busy trying to “other” Obama into electoral oblivion. (Tho’ it probably seems worse to many more people Because Twitter.) And third, the only Democratic campaign that’s been documented as trying to weaponize trolling this cycle is Clinton’s, through David Brock’s brazen, FEC-flouting “Correct the Record” initiative.

Speaking of trolls, Clinton’s most hackish and obnoxious supporters in the media (Joan Walsh, Peter Daou, Jamil Smith, Amanda Marcotte, to name a few) have once again tried to wield sexism as both sword and shield, and argue that Bernie’s solely the candidate of angry white men. (This too is a holdover from 2008 — eight years ago, the kerfuffle was over “Obama Boys”.) But saying it doesn’t make it so. In fact, it takes a willful blindness, if not outright dishonesty, not to see where the Clinton/Bernie divide has really fallen in 2016.

Despite every attempt to make Bernie’s support primarily about race, sex, or income, all the polling has made it clear since before Iowa that the great chasm between Clinton and Sanders supporters is age. This pattern emerged in the earliest states and has held through until the end: Pre-California polling had Latinos under 50 breaking Sanders 2-to-1. America’s largest Arab community (in Michigan) also went 2-to-1 for Bernie, putting him over the top there (which, by the way, puts the lie to Michael Tomasky and others’ stupid contention that only privileged people back Bernie.) The African-American vote has been more closely split, but Bernie still won over half the under-30s nationwide. And women under 30 chose Bernie over Clinton by 30 points. In total, Bernie even beat out 2008 Obama among voters under 30.

There’s a lot of reasons for this, I think, many of which I talked about in my post about Obama’s youth support in 2008: “To many older liberals and progressives, who’ve experienced one dismal setback after another since the heydays of the New Frontier and Great Society, the Clintonian brand of cautious pragmatism often seems the only viable approach to moving the country forward. Put simply, you get burned enough times, you stop using the stove. This time, irony isn’t the shackles of youth, but of their parents.”

These trends have been compounded by the Great Recession and slow recovery since 2008. While Obama et al spent years fretting about the deficit, we failed an entire generation who graduated into a world of unpaid internships and few-to-no decent jobs. This has consequences. On one hand, more young people are living with their parents than living with a partner for the first time since 1880. On the other, the broken economic system and its attendants, like grotesque inequality, have made Millennials even more amenable to lefty policies and politics. Socialism isn’t the epithet the GOP (and DLC) would make of it anymore, and the left-wing of American social and political thought, which has been hacked off several times over the past century, is regenerating anew, and beginning to test its strength.

And that’s a good thing. It gives me great hope for the future. A stronger, more vibrant left means a wider Overton window, more progressive possibility, and an end to the learned helplessness and soft bigotry of low expectations that too many of today’s scared, insipid Democrats have tried to instill in voters. (“It’s not us! It’s Newt/Bush/Frist/Boehner/Trump!”) Bernie may have made some dumb arguments along the way, and these last campaign throes, as per the norm, aren’t looking pretty. (I’m with Favreau on this one: Gutting Bernie anonymously to Politico to set up your next gig is quintessential DC-asshole behavior.) But he pulled off something altogether amazing this year. Up against a “inevitable” candidate with every possible institutional advantage behind her, a 74-year-old Socialist still ended up winning 23 states(!)

Bernie may have come up short in the end. But, if nothing else, he’s put the Democratic Party on notice: A rising generation wants more from them from now on. The same tired GOP-lite camouflage, and a non-refundable, means-tested tax credit in every pot, aren’t going to get it done anymore. Let’s hope the next President is listening, and that she doesn’t take her left flank for granted.

SotU: The “Fetal Position” Fallacy.

I know that we haven’t agreed on every issue thus far, and there are surely times in the future when we will part ways. But I also know that every American who is sitting here tonight loves this country and wants it to succeed. That must be the starting point for every debate we have in the coming months, and where we return after those debates are done. That is the foundation on which the American people expect us to build common ground.

They do? I thought they expected change we can believe in. But worn-out nods to an elusive, ephemeral, and, given the current GOP, often undesirable bipartisanship does not constitute such. In any event, so concluded the President’s State of the Union address last Thursday. This is old news at this point, so I’ll keep it brief. Suffice to say, while it got better as it went along, I thought the speech was merely ok, and often troubling. Throughout the evening, the president’s remarks had that excessively-poll-tested, small-bore feel that conjured up grim odors of 1995 and 1996. Throw on a flannel and fire up the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, y’all: One year into the Obama era, are we already back to V-chips and school uniforms?

Part of the president’s problem is that the Senate is looking like the elephant’s graveyard of progressive-minded legislation right now. The president called for an energy reform bill. The House went out on a limb to pass one last June. The president called for a financial reform bill. The House passed one in December. The president called for a new jobs bill. The House also passed one in December. All of these bills, and many, many others, are languishing in the Senate right now, as Sen. Reid and others try to figure out how to somehow get something — anything! — passed with a larger majority than Dubya ever enjoyed.

The Senate issue aside, there were other problems in the President’s speech, including far too many nods and feints in the direction of ridiculous deficit peacocks like Judd Gregg and Evan Bayh. First off, at the risk of sounding like Dick Cheney, I tend to think that deficits are troubling, but, even in the best of times, they shouldn’t really be the foremost driving concern of our government policy. If we run a deficit to invest in education now, we’ll save money down the road and improve Americans’ quality-of-life to boot. (Put in somewhat ugly fashion, it’s invest in schools now or prisons later.)

And that being said, right now is emphatically not the best of times. We know exactly what happens when you cut spending too quickly after a virulent recession — It was called the 1937 Roosevelt recession, and it would be flagrantly idiotic to repeat it. Just because the GOP doesn’t seem to understand basic Keynesian economics doesn’t mean we should follow them down the rabbit hole of flat-earth thinking, just so we can look bipartisan.

No, the problem with deficits isn’t necessarily the running of a deficit. It’s the running-up of massive deficits for patently stupid reasons — like, say, prosecuting a war of choice in Iraq, or doling out excessive tax breaks to multi-millionaires. And that’s why some of the President’s nods in that direction were so irritating last Thursday. Calling for a spending freeze on discretionary spending, without touching the exorbitant “security-related” budget (cute euphemism, that), is kabuki theater at best. And at worst, you’re balancing the books at the expense of our most vulnerable citizens. (I tend to agree with Candidate Obama on this issue anyway.)

Similarly, this deficit commission which the president plans to foist on Congress by executive order after the Senate killed it, is, again, at best kabuki theater and at worst trouble. It’s clear to everyone involved that the entire point of this commission is CYA: i.e, to create political cover for raids on entitlement spending, while once again ignoring the grotesquely swollen defense budget. (Altho’, to be fair, Secretary Gates has at least tried to rein in growth in this sector.) In other words, this commission will basically just be a chance for deficit peacocks to pretend they’re Serious People and “make tough decisions,” while in fact the one really tough idea that actually needs to be tackled — reining in defense spending — will be completely avoided.

In any event, all this discussion of the deficit ignores the larger problem. Obviously, one of the president’s biggest charges coming into office was to restore economic sanity after eight years of Dubyaite excess. That being said, people were not looking to President Obama for this sort of deficit tsk-tsking and small-bore, fiddling around the margins. You’d think we Dems would have learned this by now. But curling up into a fetal position and mouthing moderate GOP-lite bromides will not stop the Republicans from kicking us, ever.

We have a Democratic president, an 18-seat majority in the Senate, and a 79-seat majority in the House. In short, we Dems need to keep thinking big or we will pay dearly at the polls this November. Perhaps the dysfunction of the Senate is the central problem Obama faces right now, but his speech nonetheless suggests that we’re getting dangerously close to Eisenhower Republican territory now, and not even in the good “the military-industrial complex is completely frakked” kinda way. Without vision, the people perish. So too will our party, if we keep up with this thin gruel, triangulation schtick. At the advice of the careerist DLC-types over the years, we have tried this path several times over — Put simply, it does not work.

Glass Joe.

“What [Connecticut] tells us about the fall is something I think we’ve known all along, and that is the status quo in Iraq is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable to Democratic primary voters, it’s unacceptable to independents and it’s unacceptable to a large minority of Republicans. Iraq is the number one issue and the message is exceptionally simple: We cannot abide the status quo.” As Joe Lieberman likely nears the end of his days as a Democrat, Hillary, the DLC, and other centrist Dems prep for the fallout from the Connecticut primary.

Dream a little Dream.

“‘The Republicans say the economy is great for everyone,’ Clinton said. ‘They’ve done nothing about these costs that are eating away at the paychecks of hard-working Americans. Democrats will work to get health-care costs down, to get college tuitions under control, to address the rising costs of gas prices, to cut middle-class taxes and reward companies that create jobs here at home.‘” With November in the not-too-distant future (and 2008 only a step beyond), Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton announces the American Dream Initiative, a.k.a. the DLC centrists’ stab at a Contract with America-type campaign agenda: “The centerpiece proposal would provide additional support for college costs, with the goal of increasing the number of college graduates by 1 million a year by 2015…Other ideas include requirements for employers to establish retirement accounts for all workers and a refundable tax credit for savers; ‘baby bonds’ that would create a government-funded savings account of $500 for every child born in the United States; a refundable tax credit to help provide the down payment on housing; universal health care for children; and benefits for small businesses to lower the cost of providing health insurance to workers.” This all sounds good, if a bit classically Clintonesque. OK, the name is goofy (as was Hillary’s “It’s the American Dream, stupid.“), and IMHO there needs to be more here regarding both campaign finance and lobbying reform. But, still, there’s very little of the usual protective camouflage-y cruft that usually accompanies anything put out by the DLC, so that’s a good start. Let’s see where it goes.

Hiding in Plain Right.

“Many of us are disturbed by the calls for investigations or even impeachment as the defining vision for our party for what we would do if we get back into office.” Concerned about the desire for possible investigations of Dubya (as well as calls for withdrawal from Iraq) among the party’s grassroots and left-wing, the Democratic hawks of the DLC make a case for running on national security issues. I dunno..at first glance, it sounds like the same-old stale brand of warmed-over protective camouflage that the DLC’s been pushing on us for years…first you’d have to convince me that calling Dubya out for his multiple civil liberties violations and breaches of the public trust, as well as putting the brakes on our badly mismanaged foray into Iraq, aren’t national security issues.

And they’re off.

“‘We can’t afford to be anti-, against everything,’ Mr. Vilsack said. ‘America is waiting for us. They are desperate to know what we are for.’” Democratic presidential hopefuls — including Hillary Clinton, Mark Warner, Evan Bayh, and Tom Vilsacksound centrist themes and an end to internecine conflict before the DLC. And, in related news, congressional Dems finally propose an alternative to Dubya’s Social Security privatization plan with Amerisave. The plan would “increase incentives for middle-class workers to participate in 401(k) retirement accounts and individual retirement accounts [and] create tax credits for small businesses that set up retirement accounts for their employees.” Update: So much for Dem unity.

First, We take the DNC.

“Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win. You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline.” The DLC and other Democratic centrists push Tom Vilsack, Jeanne Shaheen, and a handful of other milquetoast contenders to be the next DNC head (and to thwart the Dean alternative.) Look, it’s obvious the Republican-lite status quo wasn’t working. It’s time to drop the protective camouflage and articulate a progressive narrative that highlights the grotesquely pro-corporate nature of the GOP. With that in mind, let’s sidestep the party flaks, and go ahead and pick Howard. At this point, it’s not like we have anything to lose.

Internecine Warfare.

As Dean scores another Internet coup and looks even more competitive in New Hampshire, the DLC tries to scare the left into submission with polls suggesting a mass defection of white males (veterans notwithstanding, I presume.) Perhaps it should be noted that Mark Penn is currently working for the Lieberman campaign. In related news, Jonathans Chait and Cohn debate Dean’s effect on the race in TNR. And, finally, John Edwards announces his health care plan in New Hampshire in Clintonesque fashion. (Veteran link via Follow Me Here.)

Resurgent Left Flank.

The Washington Post surveys the revival of the Left. No new ground is broken in this article, and as I’ve said numerous times before, progressives and liberals are not the same creature (Pt. II), but it’s nice to see lefties back in the Democratic equation for the time being…let’s hope it lasts beyond the primaries. The protective camouflage Republican-lite strategy of the DLC may seem like a good battle plan at first, until one realizes that, by embracing the tenets of the right — even as diluted Third Way “centrism” — the Democratic party will be forever fighting on the GOP’s turf.

Moreover, what the DLC consistently fails to understand is that swing voters care more about vision and integrity than they do about the left-right axis…hence McCain’s “Straight Talk” popularity last Presidential cycle. Many voters perceived in 2000 that Gore didn’t stand for much of anything (particularly after his schizophrenic debate performances), and soured on him – Thus, what should have been a Democratic cakewalk instead became close enough to create the conditions for the Bush-Harris-Scalia junta’s coup.

Many people aren’t flocking to Howard Dean right now because he’s a hardcore lefty, because by his own admission, he’s not. They’re flocking to him because, unlike most other Dems right now, he has a clear, consistent vision, and without vision, the people – and the Democratic Party – perish. Whether it be progressive, liberal, libertarian, communitarian, what have you — the vision animating the Democratic party should come from the left, not from the poisoned well of the bigoted, money-gluttonous right.

In sum, the left should not be browbeaten into right-lite submission by pandering DLC political careerists constantly invoking the spectre of George McGovern and 1972 – it’s time to be the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Robert Kennedy again.

Update: Not two hours after I wrote this post, John Judis compares Dean to McGovern in Salon. I agree that Dean’s got some serious problems in the South, but, c’mon, y’all. It’s getting so that George McGovern has become the new Godwin’s Law among Democratic circles.