“He Doesn’t Know the Territory”

Not to dismiss Russian hacking, voter suppression in key states, and other outside factors, but Donald Trump won the election as well because he is a much better salesman than Hillary Clinton. Actually, Hillary Clinton probably had the least sales skills of any major party general election candidate in my lifetime. This is not a compliment to Trump. I speak as someone who worked as a telemarketer for ten years, and received additional sales training during a year I spent trying to be a stock broker. This is soul-destroying work that requires you to put your conscience on the shelf, hopefully to be used later. Sales is an acting job, and a key talent of a successful politician. That’s why Ronald Reagan was so good at it. You must persuade people with values that are alien to you that your way deserves their support. It is not either enough or even necessary to have the moral high ground. Sales is how Republicans get working class voters to vote against their best economic interests. You must believe your arguments while you are presenting them, even if you know they are nonsense, or if they don’t really reflect your reasoning.

To see how this works, consider the issue of universal healthcare. Hillary Clinton tried to get universal healthcare back in 1993, but she thought selling it meant listening to arguments from all sides, and then crafting a program that helps everyone. It’s impossible, because you can not avoid harming insurance companies when you take them out of the healthcare game. Bernie Sanders tried to sell universal healthcare as a moral imperative, but we have just had conclusive proof that, for enough voters in key states, elections are not about morality. Elections are about “What’s in it for me?”, and too many voters vote defensively to avoid helping someone who might be in competition with them for services and benefits.

Despite this, I am not saying that we should give up hope of ever seeing universal healthcare in the United States. I am saying that we need a better way of selling it to voters. We should be making the capitalist argument for it. There really is one. Universal healthcare is a major job creator, and it can help to prevent jobs from being outsourced to other countries. Under our present, broken system, we have given twenty million new people health insurance they can not afford to use. Getting sick means spending money you needed for other things on getting treatment instead. That means getting sick is a major drain on consumer spending, Universal healthcare would mean you never have to divert funds for getting better, so it all goes to consumer spending. That increases demand, and that is where jobs really come from. Universal healthcare also means keeping jobs here in America. Under our current system, American companies operate at a major competitive disadvantage. Having an American workforce means you are penalized with huge health benefit expenses. Yes, you can pay much lower wages to workers in China and Mexico, but the healthcare costs really seal the deal and make it worth the expense of moving jobs to other countries.

That’s the pitch, but we also need someone with the right personality to make it. Hillary Clinton proved that the right contacts and the best fundraising machine is not enough to get it done. We need someone who thrives on working large crowds, but can also score points in a televised debate. We need a bulldog who will not leave any criticisms unanswered, but will rapidly respond without seeming mean. Clinton’s basket of deplorables remark was terrible from the point of view of making the sale, as was Mitt Romney’s 47%, because you must never insult a potential customer. It doesn’t matter if you think you are at a private function, because everything you do when you run for president is public. I don’t know who the right person is for this, but we have four years to find them. In 2020, this person will have the facts on their side, but the facts will never be as important as the pitch.

In closing, I don’t usually include music with my posts, but this really needs to be here:

Backward and Forward

Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. I still feel that Hillary Clinton would have been a good president. In particular, I believe that many progressives would have been pleasantly surprised. No, we would not have gotten universal healthcare or a $15 dollar minimum wage, but we would have gained ground on both fronts where now we stand to lose. In this post, I do not want to brood, but we must understand why we lost if we are to win next time. In Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party insiders chose a candidate and gave her a big head start in fundraising, but she was still the candidate who could not even win the nomination in 2008. That is because she has a great resume, but is a terrible candidate. In this year’s campaign, you can see why in the strategic choices she made in the debates.

After the first debate, Clinton won praise and a bump in the polls for her performance, but it is now clear that she lost that debate and the ones that followed before she even took the stage. She pursued a strategy that suited her personality, and I have to admit that I thought at the time it was a good idea; she tried to present Donald Trump as a man who was not worthy of her respect. By extension, the concerns of his potential followers were not worthy of her respect either. Hillary Clinton would defend the status quo, and you were a “deplorable” if you thought the country had serious problems. It was as if the Bernie Sanders scare in the primaries had never happened. She decided to disrespect her opponent by addressing him by his first name, and she decided to act like his criticisms of her did not deserve a serious response. She admitted, for example, that her Iraq vote and the handling of her emails were mistakes, but she missed the opportunity to tell us what she learned from them. They remained legitimate concerns of voters, where they could have been presented as valuable learning experiences.

In 2020, a Democratic candidate will run against either Donald Trump or Mike Pence. Especially if the Democrats win the Senate in 2018, I believe there is a high chance that Donald Trump will find a reason to be impeached. Still, either Trump or Pence will be the sitting president, and they will deserve to be addressed in the debates as Mr President. It will be all too easy to attack the president on all the ways he has failed the working people who placed their trust in him, but we must do more. We must offer a positive vision of the future. We must do what Hillary Clinton did not, by showing that it was the Republicans in Congress who kept the country down. It was the Republicans who kept the public option out of the Affordable Care Act and loaded it with concessions to the insurance and medical industries. It was the Republicans who loaded the Supreme Court with the Justices who made Citizens United and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act realities, and that is how our system is rigged. It was the Republicans who have stood in the way of minimum wage increases and meaningful gun control measures. And it was the Republicans who shirked their Constitutional duties, and refused to govern for the eight years that President Obama was in office. These are all negatives against the Republicans, but their flipsides are the beginning of a Democratic vision that should have won this year, and must win in 2020. We must acknowledge that the Affordable Care Act gave 20 million Americans health insurance they never had before, but still couldn’t afford to use. We must admit that cost of living increases in Social Security benefits over the years have not kept up with what it costs to be a senior citizen in the United States. We must let the workers and potential workers of this country know that the official employment numbers show an improvement, but we know too many people are still being left behind or exposed. The Republicans now know that blaming immigrants and persons of color for this is a winning strategy, one that can be explicitly stated. We must show that there is a better way, and that means explaining that the money and security that once went people who worked hard now goes instead to the very wealthy. We must show that we are all, white, black, brown, Christian, Moslem, Jew, male, female, straight or queer, in this together.

It truly is the economy, and it should have been a simple matter to defeat Trump’s message of hate and fear with a message of concern and hope. But Hillary Clinton’s defense of the status quo didn’t get it done, and Bernie Sanders’ message of righteous anger was not enough to win the chance to try. In 2020, the Democrats need to open the primaries to all comers, to not clear the decks for anyone. Then, the DNC needs to avoid any hint of favoritism, and let the people choose. Expect to be hacked, so keep both private and public communications clean. In 2020, Hilary Clinton will be the woman who lost the presidency to Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders will be almost 80 years old. So let’s start with a clean slate and no favorites, and find someone we can all support with enthusiasm. And then, let’s win this thing back.

R I P

Tonight my Facebook feed is full of words like “grieving”, “mourning”, and “freaking out”. I am seeing profanities from people who don’t normally use them. I am sorting out my feelings as I write this, but I agree with all of this. How could this happen? I feel that the only nation I have ever called home, the nation that became a refuge to my family when they were fleeing progroms, that nation has betrayed me. This country has been swayed by lies when we should be defenders of truth. America has just gotten a lot more dangerous for immigrants, sure, but also for persons of color, LGBTQ people, even people on the autistic spectrum. For anyone who is different. Income inequality just got exponentially worse. The legal protections that ensure everyone the right to vote just got much weaker. There will now be a “conservative” majority on the Supreme Court for a generation, and Citizens United is with us for at least that long. Gays may lose their right to marry, women to have a legal abortion. What exactly is it that “conservatives” conserve these days?

I hope some good can come of this. I hope the news media will take a good look at their complicity in this, and vow never to bow to the god of false equivalency again. I hope the Democratic Party agonizes over this, and realizes that they should have given us a range of real choices in the primaries, not anointed a deeply flawed Hillary Clinton as the only real choice. Don’t get me wrong on that one; I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary, but I don’t buy the argument that he would magically have beaten Trump either. Sanders’ biography would have offered the right wing hate machine all sorts of juicy points of attack, and the campaign would have been just as ugly as the one we had. But surely there must have been someone who could have stood for the Democrats that could have brought the same empathy and dignity to the campaign that Barack Obama did to the last two.

There will be better days for this country. I have to believe that. Those of us who feel that America at its best is a refuge will have to pull together and take care of each other in the bad times just ahead. We will have to accept that there are differences between us, but we can unite for the greater good. Right now I am angry at anyone who took this one for granted and did not vote at all, but I can not find a state where third party votes made the difference. I will need some time, but we need to put all of that aside, and find a way to work together if we are to have any hope of making things better. We can start by working our asses off to make some gains for the good guys in the 2017 elections.

For myself, I will try to keep my friends and family always in mind, and look for small and large ways to help. I will continue to speak out, and I will encourage others to do likewise when I can. In sadness, fear, and anger, I will try to remember to love.

One Final Word

I know I said my previous post would be my final one before the election, but this one came to me today and demanded to be written. If you are a writer, I am sure you know what I mean.

I have voted in every presidential election since 1980, and I have always tried to ignore a candidate’s personal life in making my choice. In particular, I said to anyone who would listen in both 1992 and 1996 that I did not care about Bill Clinton’s infidelities, that they had nothing to do with how he would govern. This year, I do not care that Hillary Clinton has a husband who cheated on her; the Clintons have resolved the matter between them, and that is good enough for me. To be fair, I also do not care that Donald Trump very publicly cheated on a previous wife, and I do not hold against him that two previous marriages have failed. However, I do care that he has boasted of sexually abusing and harassing women, and I do care that he will stand trial in December for raping a minor. I believe other actions and statements of his reinforce the importance of these transgressions, and help to demonstrate why they make him unfit to be president. Before you call me a hypocrite, I can explain in one word why these actions are different, and why I feel they are not just private matters to be dismissed as locker room talk or simple mistakes of a younger man.

That word is consent.

Bill Clinton’s infidelities did not leave a trail of victims, because the women involved were all willing participants. As I said, the Clintons made their private peace with what happened. Not so with Donald Trump. He has left a trail of victims because he has never cared about anyone’s consent for anything. This attitude extends well beyond his sexual activities and appetites. At the beginning of his real estate career, he demonstrated that he did not need anyone’s consent to discriminate against minority tenants. He settled one discrimination case, only to go right back to the behaviors that got him in trouble in the first place. Of more immediate concern, we have a concept that is one of the foundations of our system of government: the consent of the governed. It means there is no question that we will accept the judgement of the voters and gracefully concede when we lose an election. No one has to ask Hillary Clinton if she will accept the results if she does not win; before Trump raised the issue, the idea would have been absurd. The consent of the governed also means that a president accepts that there are constitutional limits to his power, that voters also choose Congress separately for just this reason. When Donald Trump criticizes Hillary Clinton for not accomplishing more in 30 years of public service, however, he is saying that he believes in a form of absolute power that yields to no one. She should have been able to do whatever she wanted, because that is what he would do.

Consent also has to do with honoring our treaties and alliances. Hillary Clinton will do that, and she will not order prisoners of war to be tortured, because she respects international law. Donald Trump, when he talks about foreign policy, clearly believes that, as the most powerful nation on earth, no other nation has the right to tell us what to do. He also regards torture and treaty violations as a show of strength. He believes that women should be afraid of him, and so should nations.

When you frame all of this in terms of consent, you realize that Donald Trump did not arise from a vacuum. It was George W Bush, not Trump, who made us a nation of torturers. The issue of reproductive rights is all about consent, and it has been a mainstay of Republican politics for many years. Since 2008, the Republican Party has refused to govern unless one of their own was in the White House; most of Barack Obama’s greatest accomplishments date from the brief period when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. The Republicans who are now promising not to confirm a Supreme Court justice until he or she is chosen by a Republican president are violating the principal of the consent of the governed. Make no mistake, this is a fundamental difference between the two major parties as they exist now. The Democrats would never behave this way, nor have they. In doing so, the supposedly patriotic Republicans are displaying as great a contempt for the Constitution as their presidential candidate.

On Tuesday, I will give my consent as one of the governed to someone who cares about that consent. I will do so up and down the ticket. I hope the results will show that the American people still care about the consent of the governed. Donald Trump has shown that he does not care about that consent, and his treatment of women is a facet of that.

It’s the Economy

This is likely to be my last post before the election, so it’s time to filter out all of the noise. There has been an incredible amount of noise in this campaign. So, for the purposes of this post, I will pretend that having a husband who cheats on you is the equivalent of being an unregistered sex offender. I will pretend that a foundation that openly reports all of its donors and uses almost 90% of its funds for good works is somehow the equivalent of a foundation with secret donors that engages in self-dealing and pays bribes to state attorneys-general to drop fraud investigations. And so on. Instead, I want to focus on what the likely impacts on regular people would be of a Clinton or Trump presidency. Specifically, I want to talk about the economy.

As it happens, excellent work on this subject has already been done by people who are much wiser about the economy than I am. Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics assembled a team over the summer, and presented detailed analyses of how the economy would perform under a Trump or a Clinton presidency. I don’t expect everyone to read these all the way through, so check the conclusion section of each of the three scenarios presented, and then read the overall conclusion. Zandi’s team says of a Clinton presidency:

“…the upshot of our analysis is that Secretary Clinton’s economic policies when taken together will result in a stronger U.S. economy under almost any scenario.”

Of Trump, he says:

“The upshot of Mr. Trump’s economic policy positions under almost any scenario is that the U.S. economy will be more isolated and diminished.”

To see why this so, consider the historical precedents for what each candidate wants to do. Broadly speaking, Hillary Clinton wants to continue and strengthen the policies of the Obama administration. Obama rescued the country from the brink of an economic disaster that could have rivalled the Great Depression. He has also presided over the longest streak of months of uninterrupted job growth in US history. Under his stewardship, the deficit has dropped more in dollars than under any other president. Hillary Clinton will keep that going. Strengthening the Affordable Care Act, including the addition of the public option, would provide a boost to consumer spending, creating jobs. Increasing the minimum wage would cost the government nothing, and it too would boost consumer spending. That is why, one year later, Seattle saw so a big boost to employment after raising their minimum wage to $15/hour, despite the dire predictions of opponents.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, wants to follow the model of George W Bush, only take it much further. Bush passed the largest tax cut for the wealthy in US history, and he pushed for deregulation. The result was that Bush took the first budget surplus since at least the 1950s, (gifted to him by the policies of Bill Clinton, by the way), and turned it into the largest deficit in our history. Trump thinks Bush did not go far enough, as though creating the conditions for the 2008 financial crisis wasn’t severe enough. Trump may really think this, since he was able to personally profit handsomely from the 2008 crisis. Bush presided over the worst economic performance of any president since Herbert Hoover.

I should note that Mark Zandi is one of the most respected economists on Wall Street. He can not afford to have his reputation sullied by even a hint of partisanship. He has customers of all political persuasions, and his success depends on all of their trust. I also want to add a note for anyone who says Hillary Clinton lies and Trump tells it like it is. Donald Trump can stand in the lobby of one of the hotels he built with illegal Chinese steel, dressed in one of his name-brand suits which are made in China, and tell you how he wants to prevent American jobs from being shipped overseas. Something doesn’t compute. Please think about that before you vote on Tuesday.

The Media and the Message

For my readers who feel that the negatives attached to Hillary Clinton are too strong for you to give her your vote, I want to propose an experiment. Don’t do this for me or for Hillary Clinton; do it for yourselves. Make a list of every reason you can think of why you can’t vote for Clinton. Take your time, and include everything, no matter how trivial. Now remove from your list anything Donald Trump doesn’t agree with. If your list didn’t shrink much or at all, that should scare the hell out of you. How could this happen? The answer is that, if you trace all of your reasons to the root source, you are relying on the same media sources as Donald Trump. At this point, you may tell me that there is no way Trump gets his information from, say, Bipartisan Report, and you might tell me that they are reliably progressive. Yes and no. There are many sites like this, whose owners are truly progressive, but the stories they publish had their start in the right wing media. Even if they don’t, the key is understanding how to tell fact from fiction.

To illustrate this point, let me show you an article a friend of mine posted recently. She proclaimed that this was a deal breaker for her, why she could never support Hillary Clinton. The article was from a site I had never heard of before, True Activist, and the provocative headline was: ”Future Clinton Treasury Secretary Announces Plan To Privatize Americans’ Retirement Savings” . Something didn’t seem right about this, so I tried to find out who was behind this website, and what their agenda was. There is no “About Us” page, so I looked at the submission guidelines for new writers, and I learned that True Activist wants to “expose false or misleading events that are misrepresented by the mainstream media, etc.” Now that could be a rallying cry from the left or the right, and the home page presents a hodge-podge of articles that reflect this. This site seems to have no overarching point of view at all, except for the premise that everything in the mainstream media is suspect. That assumption creates an environment where outright lies can flourish, but I did not have a smoking gun at this point. So I went back to the article itself, and I noticed something I had missed before: the text in red, which I had thought was simply for emphasis, was actually a set of links. Follow the link for “most likely pick for Treasury Secretary”, and you will find an article on Politico that says the subject of the True Activist article, Tony James, is “sometimes mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary in a Clinton administration.” That hardly makes him the future Treasury Secretary proclaimed in the headline, so now I have caught True Activist in a lie. But what about James’ proposal? The article on True Activist never says that his plan privatizes Social Security, but it stokes those fears, saying “Americans’ retirement savings would be lumped together under Wall Street control, allowing them to gamble with the massive sum and make a killing from the bets. However, any “misplaced” bets would be the problem of everyday Americans invested in the system, not the hedge funds who made those bad bets.” So I followed the link that reads, “revealed his plan”. It turns out that Tony James isn’t proposing any changes to Social Security at all. He is actually concerned about how people who do not have traditional pensions save for retirement to supplement the benefits they will receive from Social Security. 401(k)s, IRAs, Keough Plans and more are all completely at the mercy of market gyrations, and these plans are already “under Wall Street control”, as the True Activist writer puts it. What James is proposing is to replace all of this with a Retirement Savings Plan that would be guaranteed by the government to return at least 2% in any year, no matter what the markets did. He also wants to change the tax treatment for this plan, so that lower income workers would get a tax benefit from their contributions that is only available now to more affluent workers. At this point, the True Activist article has collapsed completely, and I feel comfortable saying that they are an unreliable media source, one of many. The author of the article may be a well-intentioned progressive or not, but she read her sources for this article expecting to find a smoking gun. Because the right wing media had spread the idea that Hillary Clinton wanted to privatize Social Security, our hapless author found that, even though it wasn’t actually there.

The point of all this is that we must all become smarter media consumers. A major reason Donald Trump became the Republican nominee in the first place was the development over a long period of time of a system of right wing media outlets that have a blatant disregard for facts. Fox News and Breitbart are two of the best known, but there are many others. This year, they learned that they could create a website that seemed to be engaged in reasoned discourse, and people on the left would spread their stories, ostensibly to support Bernie Sanders. I saw this in Sanders groups throughout the primary season. People avoided the harder task, perhaps, of making the positive case for Sanders, and instead spread anything and everything they could find that attacked Hillary Clinton. This served to legitimize websites that did not deserve it, which only made things worse.

I understand how this can get started. It is true that mainstream media sources will neglect to cover a story that might not sit well with an important advertiser, for example. This does not mean that they are lying in what they do cover, but it does mean we need additional sources of information. I also understand the thrill of discovering a story that no one else has heard of yet, or a new source of information. That is exactly why I went into such detail about the True Activist article, and how I debunked it. It is also why I list fact checkers and trusted media sources on the sidebar of this blog. I don’t pretend that either list is complete, and I welcome suggestions for inclusion, but I intend to be very careful in making any additions; this is just too important. In my example, I mentioned the importance of trying to find out who is behind the website you are using, and determining their agenda. You can also sometimes check the credentials and agenda of the author of the article. If you are still not sure, use your fact checkers; in my example, that was not necessary, but it often is. Finally, understand that no one has an exclusive for long without a reason. If a story has substance, you should be able to find more details and reports in other places within a day’s time.

With all of this in mind, I invite you to return to your list of negatives about Hillary Clinton. Take the time to subject each and every one of them to this test. I guarantee you will have to drop some of them. I don’t agree with everything she wants to do, but I always have a small list of negatives about any candidate for president I decide to vote for. That happens when you have to form a consensus with millions of your countrymen to select your next leader. It’s called Democracy, and I would never be willing to give it up. If your newly fact-checked and smell tested list of Clinton negatives still persuades you to withhold your vote from her, I respect that. But I hope you will do the work first, and know that you are making your decision based on facts.

The Rich Are Different

In this election, we have something we have not seen before. Both candidates come, without apologies, from wealth. The rags to riches story is a staple of American politics, used even by candidates who had to severely strain credulity to claim it. But this year, there are no such claims. Donald Trump was born into an obscenely wealthy family, and Hillary Rodham Clinton was also comes from money. On a subconscious level, the negative approval ratings of both candidates are a statement of class resentment. Because the rich are different, and Americans are not comfortable with the differences.

You can see this when you look at some of the scandals the Clintons have been linked to. In Whitewater, large sums of money changed hands, so there must have been wrongdoing. But for a person of wealth, the amounts of money were not that large, and this was simply a deal that went sour. It happens, and you move on to the next deal. You and I might never be in a position to make such deals, and certainly not take shake off a failed one in this way, but the rich don’t think like us. More recently, Hillary Clinton has drawn fire for her speaking fees from Wall Street firms, and for the donations the Clinton Foundation has received. Goldman Sachs payed her more for one speech than we might earn in four years of hard work. So yes, I would be powerfully influenced by someone who payed me that much all at once. But Hillary Clinton didn’t even need the money; she gave it to charity. When she gives a speech, she accepts a fair market price for her services, and her customers do hope to influence her. But it is all too easy to forget that it is a two way street; Clinton also hopes to influence them. Bill Clinton’s presidency was all about creating a new paradigm for the Democratic Party, a partnership of government and wealth for the purpose of doing as much good as possible. There are limits to this approach, places where the common man gets left behind in the name of compromise. But the Clinton Foundation is a fine example of how much good work can be done this way. Almost 90% of the funds donated go to the Foundation’s programs, and all donations are publicly disclosed. It’s a terrible way to buy favors, but it’s a great vehicle for burnishing your reputation, a verifiable good deed you can boast about. The Clinton Foundation works on AIDS and other public health issues in the third world, climate change, and antipoverty programs in the US and abroad.

And so it is with the rich. To them, money is a tool for extending influence. They give and receive it to burnish their reputations, to try to win an argument, and to recruit allies for their various causes. Bill Gates tries to further his education initiatives. George Soros promotes progressive causes including Black Lives Matter. Even the Koch brothers are trying to advance a social agenda they truly believe in, by playing the influence game. But Donald Trump is an aberration within this world.

The unmasking this week of Donald Trump as a sexual predator really only serves to complete a portrait that has been developing for some time, and extends far beyond issues of gender. Trump truly believes that his wealth means that he can do anything he wants. He can, as he has boasted, buy off politicians and others, as seen in his political donations to end fraud investigations into Trump University. Judge Curiel’s crime, in this world view, is not his Mexican heritage at all, but the fact that he refuses to be bought. Trump believes that his riches and fame mean that no one should refuse him anything, so naturally no woman should ever refuse his sexual advances, no matter how coarse. He took for granted that officials within the Republican Party would have no choice but to line up to support him, and he was right. That may have changed with this week’s revelations, but it is also possible that the Party will come back to his side once the storm blows over. Where Hillary Clinton understands that power is a tool that is not for her exclusive use, Trump believes it is his birthright. Trump can stand in front of a crowd in Ohio and talk about how trade deals are costing American jobs, while dressed entirely in clothes bearing his brand which are made in China, because it is all a game to him. His voters are people whose concerns don’t matter to him, but who can be fooled into doing his will. Where Hillary Clinton can not truly understand what it is like to be poor, Donald Trump does not want or try to understand.

I work with a wide variety of people at my job. We are all in roughly the same place economically, but we are each individuals, and we respond differently to the same circumstances. Hillary Clinton is a rich woman doing the best she can to help. Donald Trump is an outlier, interested only in himself. The rich are different from us, and also from each other.

A Few Words About Misogyny

Misogyny. There are a couple of problems that I have with it in this campaign. This year, misogyny is the poisonous idea that anyone who does not intend to vote for Hillary Clinton is taking that position because Clinton is female. At their worst, the misogyny crowd does not even give credit to those who try to prove gender is not an issue for them by supporting Jill Stein. The truth is, gender is an issue for all of us if we are honest, but there are other reasons why someone could not support Hillary Clinton that don’t get addressed as soon as misogyny enters the discussion.

It is certainly true that Hillary Clinton is being held to a much more rigorous standard than her opponent by the media. But blaming that on gender ignores other important reasons for this. I see one standard for coverage of Clinton that amounts to the normal vetting of a presidential candidate in years past. In the last two elections before this one, Barack Obama was held to this standard, but so were Mitt Romney and John McCain. Reporters and pundits believed that any of them might become president, and so the coverage focused on what that might mean for the country. This year, only Clinton is being covered that way, although there are some signs that that may be changing. But up to now, Donald Trump has been held to the same standard as Gary Johnson and Jill Stein; they are interesting side shows, but only Clinton has the chance to actually become president. Trump is more interesting than the other two because he was somehow the best the Republican Party could offer the American people this year, but he is obviously not suited to be president, so no vetting is needed. That attitude in the press has created a situation where a horrible accident could occur, and Trump could actually get elected. But gender has nothing to do with it.

Another reason someone might withhold support from Hillary Clinton is an honest difference of opinion on the issues. This goes back to the primary campaign, where supporters of Bernie Sanders were accused of misogyny, but it still comes up now. In the primary campaign, if you said that Sanders was the more electable candidate, were you saying that you personally would not vote for a woman? If your answer to that question was, no but I don’t think the country is ready, the misogyny police came out in force. But I never saw anyone in the Sanders camp actually say that. Sanders was supposedly more electable because he wasn’t burdened with all the scandals that had gathered around Hillary Clinton over the years. This had nothing to do with gender, since the scandals had begun as attacks on Bill Clinton. More recently, the email scandal has played differently for Hillary Clinton than it did for Colin Powell, for example. But that is because the Republicans and their allies in the right wing media don’t go after their own. In bringing up misogyny in this context, an important difference between the two major Parties gets ignored.

Don’t get me wrong. I certainly believe that misogyny is real, and that it is a factor in some people’s voting decisions this year. But calling someone out as a misogynist is not going to win hearts, minds, or votes. In 2008, the best answer to racism was to elect President Obama, and let him prove as he has so well that a black man was well suited to the job of president. So it is now. Hillary Clinton will prove that a woman can do the job by doing it. Until then, we who intend to vote for her do her a great disservice by crying misogyny whenever someone disagrees with us. Name calling is not a way to win an election, especially if it is a substitute for a real discussion of the issues.

I said at the beginning of this article that I had a couple of problems with misogyny. The second problem is the word itself, and what it tells us about the use of language in this campaign. Misogyny is a beast of a word to spell. Sexism is a rough definition, but it lacks the nuance one gets with the word misogyny. Hillary Clinton is a very intelligent person who thinks hard about the details. She tends to try to use exactly the right word to say what she means. Trump, on the other hand, deals in generalities. His language is blunt and lacking in precision, but, unlike Clinton, he uses language in much the same way his supporters do. This is why, with all the documented lies Trump has told, a recent poll showed that people think he is more honest than Clinton. Her use of language involves a precision that feels to some people like she is showing off her big vocabulary. She is a member of the elite, in this view, who don’t understand the problems of real Americans. If she uses words and phrases that voters don’t hear from the others in their social circles, it can also reinforce the idea that she speaks in this manner to conceal important matters from the electorate. Someone who feels this way would say instead, “She talks that way because she is hiding something.” If Hillary Clinton wants to inspire trust, she can start at tomorrow night’s debate by simplifying her language. She will lose some precision, but she will gain a connection that has eluded her up to now. She will help voters decide that she is someone they would enjoy having a beer with. This is a completely shallow standard for choosing a president, and it has nothing to do with the ability to govern, but study after study has shown that it is how many people vote. And it has everything to do with use of language, and very little to do with misogyny.

An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton

Dear Madame Secretary,

I will be voting for you in November, because I believe this country faces a stark and obvious choice in this election. I live in a solid blue state that you will carry with or without my vote, but I also believe it is important to participate in the process if you wish to change it. I also hope that your margin of victory will have a bearing on the agenda you choose to pursue. That said, I am disturbed by what I have seen so far in this campaign. In particular, I watched the Commander in Chief Forum, and I was not comfortable with what I saw. This event marked the beginning of the real campaign, the post Labor Day period where the American people turn their focus in earnest to the choosing of the president. This is where you have to get us to trust you, and your performance last night did not do that.

“Performance” is exactly the problem, in fact. You gave good answers to the questions you were asked, but, as is so often the case, they felt rehearsed and planned. I know that is part of running for office, but it is especially important for you to make us feel that we are hearing not what you think you should say but rather what you genuinely believe. Donald Trump may inspire fear and disgust with the things he says, but no one doubts that they are seeing him for who he is. I have read articles that say that, in private, you are a great listener, and you inspire great loyalty as a result. We the American people need to see that side of you. We need to see you not explaining, but just caring. That is how you will earn our trust. That is how you will turn my vote of necessity into a vote of enthusiasm. And that is how you will make it harder for your enemies to get these endless scandals to stick to you.

So, I have a suggestion. As often as possible, set up events where you meet one on one with a private citizen. It should be someone who does not totally agree with you, maybe even someone who is leaning towards voting for Donald Trump or Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. Present a private conversation with this person on live television. There should be no moderators, no live audience, and most importantly, you must have no idea in advance what questions this person will ask. Just sit down to talk for an hour, and let the cameras roll. Be yourself, and let us see who that is.

I know how this sort of thing works. I can not ask this of you unless I hold up my end of the bargain. So yes, if you wanted to have one of these conversations with me, I would be willing. There is actually a lot I would like to tell you and ask you, and it wouldn’t be all softball questions. I don’t want to put my contact information out in this public forum, but I should not be hard to find if you are interested. I would not accept any compensation, because I do not want this to have any appearance of impropriety. Having said all that, I really don’t expect you to choose me. But I hope you will somehow see this, and will consider doing these events. Thank you.

Darius Rips

The Lady Doth Protest Too Much

A few days ago, I posted an article on Facebook which raked Jill Stein’s platform over the coals, and demonstrated that her proposals are not based on reality. The author used this to make the case that Stein is completely unsuited to be president. In sharing this, I missed the point, and so did the article. I expected that the article would set off a firestorm of comments, and it did. What I did not expect is that no one really bothered to refute the points the article actually made. Instead of arguing that they believe in Stein, my friends instead began lining up their attacks on Hillary Clinton. Others came to Clinton’s defense, including me, but we did not stress Stein’s faults either. The argument is still raging. In thinking about all this, I realized that Jill Stein’s fitness to be president is beside the point. Almost no one is voting for her to be president. They are voting to express their anger at how the Democratic nominating process was handled. They are expressing their displeasure with Bernie Sanders for wanting to work within the system for change, and surrendering his perceived ideological purity to do so. And most of all, they are voting to express their mistrust of Hillary Clinton.

When you understand this kind of voting, you begin to see it everywhere. The Republican Party establishment had coronated Jeb Bush as their standard bearer before their nominating process ever got going. They knew he was a weak candidate, but they thought that, by flooding the field with Tea Party protest choices, they could get Bush through to the nomination. The field of extremists would cancel each other out, making the size of the field the perfect defense against further encroachment. They did not expect that Donald Trump would quickly master his role as a protest candidate. As with Jill Stein, Trump’s fitness to be president does not matter to his faithful, because they do not expect him to be elected. Instead, he is a figurehead who gives them an avenue to express their anger. The absurd proposals he reiterated this week regarding immigration do not matter, because his followers don’t want real policy proposals from him. They want his anger at trade policies, perceived preferential treatment of minorities, and his disdain for elites like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, who think they know what is best for the people Trump speaks to.

Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate, has been pushed as a possible counter-protest choice for Republicans who can not bring themselves to support Trump. Johnson and his party stand, more than anything, for severe limits on government. Keep in mind that establishment Republicans like Mitch McConnell have dedicated themselves to the refusal to govern for a Democratic president, and the choice of Johnson as a protest becomes understandable. In some ways, a Republican vote for Johnson is an expression of anger at themselves for failing to control their own party. For a progressive voter, a vote for Johnson is a rejection of our political process. It is an exercise in bomb throwing, saying that the process does not work, and the only way to fix it is to destroy it. Neither a progressive nor a Republican who votes for Johnson is saying anything about whether Johnson is fit to be president.

The most interesting protest candidate to consider in this light is Bernie Sanders. I have no doubt that Sanders began his campaign as a protest. As an avowed socialist who lived most of his life during the Cold War, Sanders must have started with the assumption that he would not win. He also must have known that, as a Jew, he would have to deal with anti-Semitic attacks if he became the nominee. Hillary Clinton would never have stooped so low, but Donald Trump certainly would have, and I am grateful that we never had to find out how well it might have worked. A vote for Sanders then, as he framed it, was a vote for the economically dispossessed who were being ignored by the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. For Sanders, this was always a protest from within, which is why he ran as a Democrat to begin with. Of course we know what happened. Sanders drew far more support than even he expected. His socialism proved not to be an obstacle for far more Americans than he ever dreamed. It was when it started to get real that the Sanders campaign began to slow down. Faced with the possibility that he might actually become the nominee, it suddenly began to matter how he would actually govern, and Sanders got bogged down somewhat in the details. In the end, he came up short of the needed delegates. At that point, he did what he had said he would do from the very beginning. He fought for, and won, concessions to his positions, and then he came out in support of Hillary Clinton. Up to now, his is the only protest candidacy this year that has succeeded on its terms.

Growing up as I did in a family that placed a great importance on politics, I lived through many arguments about the value of protest voting versus supporting an actual potential president. The conclusion that I reached is the one I am sticking to this year. Primaries are the times to support protest candidates, the time to express one’s ideals for what the president should be and do. In the general election, especially one where the differences between the candidates are as stark as they are this year, I vote for the best potential president available. By refusing to opt out of the process by protest voting, I believe I am letting the Democratic Party know that I must be counted, this year and in elections to come, as a likely voter. A Republican who wants to influence his or her party this way can vote for Trump if they believe he represents the direction the Party should go in, or he or she can let the Republican establishment know that things have gotten out of hand by voting for Hillary Clinton. The system we have is not going to be destroyed by the protest votes of perhaps 15% of the electorate, (a generous number). Instead, I believe, these voters are telling the two major parties that they can ignore their votes, and govern only for the ones who actually put and keep them in office. There is nothing ideological pure about this, and I hope for the chance to criticize President Hillary Clinton in this space starting next year. But I will not withhold my vote from her, given everything that is at stake.

An Open Letter to Bernie or Bust

In this post, I am not going to try to talk you out of it. I have presented elsewhere evidence that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders competed for the Democratic nomination under the same messed up rules, that the voter suppression that occurred was perpetrated by local Republican officials, and made possible by the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court. But you don’t want to hear that. In the end, the greatest crime committed by Hillary Clinton is that she fails your test of ideological purity. And she does, I won’t deny it. So you have grandly declared that you will never vote for “that woman”. You will vote for Jill Stein, or Gary Johnson, or you will stay home. I have seen some people say that they would vote for Donald Trump, as an act of revenge on the Democrats; if this is you, I can only say that you never knew what you were doing in supporting Bernie Sanders. Donald Trump represents everything Bernie Sanders opposes, so you could only vote for Trump now if you never really supported Sanders’ policy goals in the first place. This post is for the rest of you, the ones who genuinely care about what Sanders wanted to do.

Tonight, Hillary Clinton will give her acceptance speech. In so doing, she will set the tone for the fall campaign. She will reveal what approach she will take to trying to defeat Donald Trump, and we will understand which potential voters she feels are most important to her chances of victory. That is where you come in. Clinton had to decide which was her priority: reunifying the party by appealing to the supporters of Bernie Sanders, or appealing to the much more conservative swing voters who decide normal elections. This election is not normal in part because of the strength Bernie Sanders showed in bringing so many people together in the cause of economic justice. If we stayed together, there might be enough of us to risk alienating swing voters in order to address our concerns. This would also have a bearing on how Hillary Clinton would govern, because she would want a second term, and in a second term she would want to leave a legacy that the next Democrat could run on. But you have let Hillary Clinton know that these elections will be decided without you. Your vote will not count, or you will not vote at all.

By now, you know that Bernie Sanders does not agree with you. He endorsed Hillary Clinton after gaining as much ground as possible in the negotiations over the Party platform. He demonstrated that he was not attempting some weird trickery to snatch the nomination at the convention, instead calling for Clinton to receive the nomination by acclamation. He made it clear during the primaries that he believes there are important differences between himself and Clinton, but he has made it clear now that he believes supporting Clinton is the path that allows him to do the greatest good.

You have a perfect right to disagree. But remember, you came together in the first place because you believed in Bernie Sanders. If you feel betrayed now, what is your rationale for existing as any kind of movement? My answer is to continue to work for change within the Democratic Party. That does not have to be your answer. But I hope you will learn everything you can about how successful movements for social change have won their victories. I hope you will study the history of how viable third parties have come to be in the history of the United States. And most of all, I hope you will translate everything you learn into concrete, meaningful actions. If you do that, you and I will always be allies, and I will welcome your help. You may not believe that now, but I hope there will a time when victories have been won on both of our paths, and we can get together and thank each other. Until then, go in peace.

Endings and Beginnings

Bernie Sanders, with his endorsement of Hillary Clinton this week, admitted that he will not be the Democratic nominee for president this year. By pledging to work for Hillary Clinton’s victory, he also signaled to his supporters that he does not want to run as a write in or third party candidate. This is a message that some of his most vocal supporters are finding hard to accept. I have been expecting and bracing for this moment for a while now, but I am not going to gloat or say I told you so. I have been where these “Berners” are now, and I feel your pain. It’s just that I went through this a long time ago.

My parents grew up in the Great Depression, when capitalism had failed, and great changes were possible for the liberal cause. Eugene V Debs was a Communist Party candidate who received one million votes in the 1932 election, at a time when that was a much higher percentage of the electorate than it is now. Following that, Communists could and did visit the Roosevelt White House and had a chance to influence the shaping of the New Deal. My parents met because of their activism in the years following World War II, and they were ready to change the world. By the time I came along, the great cause was the protests against the Vietnam War. We were a politically aware family, and the first presidential election I remember was in 1968. I was eight years old, and I understood the election as a simple fight between good and evil, with Eugene McCarthy being the agent of good. Four years later, I could have described in much more detail why George McGovern was the good guy, and Richard Nixon the villain. I also felt McGovern’s landslide defeat much more strongly than I had McCarthy’s loss. By 1984, I was the avid follower of politics that I remain today, and I could tell you in great detail why it would be a disaster if the nation had to endure another four years of Ronald Reagan, but I watched Walter Mondale suffer another landslide defeat. Somewhere in the ashes of these three losses especially, I learned that most American voters do not think like me. By extension, I also learned that a liberal candidate could not become president unless another disaster on the scale of the Great Depression occurred. Barring that, the best outcome would be that we could show enough strength to influence policy.

Bernie Sanders is roughly a generation older than me, and he learned these same lessons. His candidacy this year was that show of strength that I mentioned, and it won him major concessions in the Democratic platform. Despite the noise about her, Hillary Clinton is exactly the kind of candidate who is most likely to be influenced by all of this. She practices the politics of the possible, and Sanders has shown her that more is possible now than she thought. Her incrementalism is a reflection of the fact that American voters fear changes that come too quickly, and that is the simplest explanation of how she beat Sanders for the nomination. But the American people were ready when gay marriage arrived, and Sanders showed that they are ready to build a new set of paradigms regarding the economy.

The most encouraging thing I have seen from Sanders supporters since the endorsement is a discussion of how to use the momentum this campaign has generated. People who were brought together in support of Sanders are talking about staying in touch, and using their numbers to influence elections at state and local levels. They have had their first taste of activism, and at least some want to do more. Bernie Sanders knew when he started this that even the election in November was not the end of the fight. To maintain pressure, the followers he gathered would have to gird themselves for a long siege, and learn to celebrate a series of small victories instead of one large one. There will be those who feel betrayed right now, and will fade away after the election, never to be this involved again. But there are also signs that some will stay around and continue to work for change. They are the ones who will have a chance to show present and future Hillary Clintons what is possible.