2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumHow Clintonism continues to hurt Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton had the opportunity to differentiate herself from the Clinton Presidency when she was elected to the Senate. She did not. Her record has been discussed thoroughly and is well-known. It's the reason I supported Obama instead of her (and my disappointment with his administration is a topic for another day). Her tenure as Secretary of State also did nothing to allay my concerns about what kind of President she would be.
The Democratic Party lost its way in the Clinton years.
Here's the Clinton 90s that so many people seem to be longing for... and that she played a big role in:
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/13/bill_clintons_odious_presidency_thomas_frank_on_the_real_history_of_the_90s/
FreakinDJ
(17,644 posts)where is the change
ibegurpard
(16,685 posts)Has enabled and continues to enable the Democratic Party to push and successfully pass Republican policy. We really have become the pro-abortion Republican Party... and even THAT'S not secure if you read some of Hillary Clinton's recent statements on abortion.
Peace Patriot
(24,010 posts)...from his abandonment of working people, labor unions and the poor and the black and the brown--all of the "Big Tent" Party's traditional constituents--to NAFTA's destruction of hundreds of thousands of good jobs here and destruction of a million small farmers in Mexico, to the Telecom Act's consolidation of media to the destruction of our banking laws, to the horrendous destructiveness of Clinton's "Crime Bill" (merely for punishment of the poor--violent crime was actually on the decrease at the time!) to the smug, arrogant, well-heeled professional class that benefited from all this, while the rest of us headed for the catastrophe of the Bush junta.
On second thought, take a ginger pill first, cuz reading it all in one sitting, as I just did, will make you sick.
And Hillary was right there through all of it, cheerleading and organizing and enabling, and occasionally chirping out precious items like her "super-predator" children. She actually organized Bill's schedule so he could insult traditional Democrats, liberals and activists like Jesse Jackson, so the Clintons could prove their hard-heartedness to the moneyed class.
The Clintons dumped us all out and turned our party into the Party of Money.
This is not exactly why I went to Seattle in 1999, and marched with 50,000 people and got teargassed with 10,000 people who shut down the WTO. I was protesting BILL CLINTON and NAFTA and other globalization policies. My focus was the environment, but there were thousands of labor union members represented and other liberal causes. It was the most amazing protest I've ever been part of--beautifully peaceful, brutally disrupted by a police riot, and forever slandered by the Corporate media as "violent."
I knew then how bad "free trade for the rich" was. But I hadn't yet understood how bad all these other policies were and are. So this election is an awakening for me in many ways, as it is an awakening for many others on varying issues. Hillary Clinton and her Goldman Sachs candidacy did not come out of nowhere. It is the direct descendant of Bill and Hillary's abandonment of the majority of Democratic Party members when Bill was president.
To have a presidential candidate who speaks the truth about these things is a wonderful development! Bernie Sanders is educating us all, even those of us who thought we knew something.
My thanks to Thomas Frank, the author of this article, for laying it all out. Seen as a whole, it is very clear what we must do to reclaim our party and our democracy.