Letters to the Editor
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Hypocrites
This is disgusting. There is a bleeding rhinoceros head in the room: PA has been in trouble for at least 25 years. I used to go there on weekends, up from Maryland, to Western PA, to a town so small that if you blink you would miss the only traffic light. They had no jobs, the fellows I met there said they had to leave to find a job. No one has shown me how things might have actually changed.
Hillary Clinton is an opportunistic liar. Look at the other articles quoted over on Huffington Post from TPM: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/188673.php where there is reliable testimony that Hillary and Bill have discussed the same things in cold and clinical terms without batting an eyelash:
"Theda Skocpol writes in ...
I have been in meetings with the Clintons and their advisors where very clinical things were said in a very-detached tone about unwillingness of working class voters to trust government -- and Bill Clinton -- and about their unfortunate (from a Clinton perspective) proclivity to vote on life-style rather than economic issues. To see Hillary going absolutely over the top to smash Obama for making clearly more humanly sympathetic observations in this vein, is just amazing. Even more so to see her pretending to be a gun-toting non-elite. Give us a break!
I wonder if she realizes that gaining a few days of lurid publicity that might reach a slice of voters is going to cost her a great deal in the regard of many Democrats, whose strong support she will need if she somehow claws her way to the nomination -- and even more so if she does not clinch the nomination. The distribution of "we're not bitter" stickers to her campaign rallies is the height of over-the-top crudity, and the reports are that very few audience members seem to have much enthusiasm for this nonsense. Not surprisingly, people cannot see the reasons for so much fuss.
Yes, she wants a big break, she desperately wants the nomination she and Bill believe is hers by right. We all know that. But where is her authenticity and her dignity and her sense of any proportion?
This has to be one of the few times in U.S. political history when a multi-millionaire has accused a much less wealthy fellow public servant, a person of the same party and views who made much less lucrative career choices, of "elitism"! (I won't say the only time, because U.S. political history is full of absurdities of this sort.) In a way, it is funny -- and it may not be long before the jokes start."
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist at Harvard University.
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uh..excuse me, but how's that again?
I'm sure someone pointed this out already, but if these "low-information" voters are really so very smart, why have they been voting more or less continuously AGAINST their own interests for the last 40 years, if they are not pathetically vulnerable to the kind of crude agitprop swill the GOP has been slinging in all that time? Hmmm?
Obama had a point, Mr. Lind. So do you. But that does not made what he said any less plausible.
We've been flattering the rubes in this country for 50 years, and look what it's gotten us. I'd say, maybe it's time to stop flattering them, and tell a few hard truths.
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Obama talks to working-class whites in Indiana
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc9PepjyDow
He reiterates the point that ordinary people have been lied to and manipulated. The audience starts out skeptical. After one minute they have perked up and are smiling with the recognition that he is telling the truth. After two minutes they are clapping. After three minutes, STANDING OVATION.
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populists and progressives
This recycling of old cliches is disingenuously incomplete. First, let's be clear who the counterparts to the populists are. They are the "progressives" -- a term those who sneer at "goo-goo" types avoid because of its positive connotation -- heir to the Roosevelt/Wilson (hence bipartisan) efforts to reform everything from political machines to the corporate malfeasance. Second, let's be clear why the New Deal "populist" coalition broke down: it was the direct result of the civil rights movement and the attempts to give blacks a fair shake in the coalition which led to the defeat of the great populist Hubert Humphrey. The "Reagan Democrat" phenomenon was really a Wallace/Nixon Democrat phenomenon. Third let's be clear on what Obama was trying to do -- BRIDGE the existing schism by getting the progressives to be a little more understanding of the populists. Last person to do this? FDR. OK maybe Clinton, too. Fourth, let's be clear on the win/lose records of the two types -- Carter was a progressive; Mondale, the biggest Democratic loser in since WW II a populist. The article attempts to fudge this by conflating "populists" with "southerners" and "cultural conservatives." But the "southern strategy" has been a best since Gore, the southerner lost the south. Ironically, Dukakis actually got the highest share of the popular vote of any Democrat between 1976 and 1996, losing 53-47 and ran much closer in the once-Republican industrial Midwest showing the potential of winning these states which Clinton (with help from Perot) eventually did and every Democrat has done since (except Ohio). Finally, in the end, let's be clear on who loses the most when the white working class "populists" vote Republican on "cultural issues" because this that or the other progressive seemed somehow, inexplicably, more elitist than Bush. They, the white working class, do. Maybe it's time to start building a party without them. They are, after all, dwindling in numbers.
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Enough of the Clintons
Who wouldn't be "bitter" seeing the plight of our country now? Seeing the conditions imposed on our population by the wheelers and dealers in Washington who lie cheat and mistreat those whom they are milking of their life blood, bitter is a mild word to say the least.
The suddenly pious gun-toting Hillary wheeling and dealing will never get my vote!
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thanks for objectivism
this is the sanest post iv read on the subject, regardless of what the crazies are writing.