6 thoughts on “Get More Smarter On Thursday (Feb. 4)”

1. Did a 'pub hop over on HB 1002?  I thought the House was 34D-31R.

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   1. Ah, never mind.  Apparently, it was Kit Roupe.

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2. "Progressive" being a somewhat taboo descriptive around here, I'd have to ask other CPolsters this: why Hillary is trying to own it?

   "The right started its 20-year jihad against Hillary precisely because she was an advocate for progressive causes and a champion of equal rights," said Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress.

   Clinton often clashed against the centrists in her husband's White House. One famous example was successfully pushing then-President Bill Clinton to veto bankruptcy reform legislation in the late 1990s, when she joined forces with Elizabeth Warren, who was then still a law professor at Harvard University. A 1998 Warren op-ed moved her to request a meeting examining how the legislation — pushed by credit card companies — would disproportionately affect women trying to collect alimony and child support from their ex-husbands.

   "I never had a smarter student," Warren recounted in a 2004 interview with PBS host Bill Moyers.

   Hillary the Progressive, sourced by Bill Moyers and Elizabeth Warren. I hope Claire McCaskill wasn't in the room.

   And there's always a but…..why does Clinton continuously get the centrist tag?

   "Most progressives that I know really do not raise millions of dollars from Wall Street," Bernie Sanders said Wednesday.

   Jeez, I wonder if he's including home town favorite Monsieur Bennet in that statement? Someone will tell me.

   And….

   Part of it is her associations. During the 2008 campaign, Clinton took a real hit when news broke that her top adviser, Mark Penn, was also working for the Colombian government lobbying for a trade agreement, and when it was revealed that Bill Clinton had taken $800,000 in speaking fees from a Colombia group trying to bring business to the country. From there, it was largely assumed that she, too, was supportive of trade agreements. But the actual record was more complicated. When HuffPost tried to uncover Clinton's position on the North American Free Trade Agreement — which was the subject of fairly relentless attacks from the Obama campaign — it found people vouching for her skepticism.

   "Honestly, I think it's because folks just equate her with her husband, which, in my view, is either sexist or absurd," Tanden said. "She's a thinking, breathing person with different views and to just equate her is ridiculous. Would we ever do that to a man?"  

   Her support for the Iraq War has also been cited. As Tommy Vietor, a former Obama aide and veteran of that campaign noted, whenever there was a hard argument about ideology, they would be able to "trump everything with Iraq."  

   But part of it, truly though, is that "progressive" and "centrist" labels are impossible to apply to politicians like Clinton, or, really, to many other politicians outside a handful of senators on the far ends of their parties.

   "Left versus center, progressive versus moderate — those are constructs that simply don’t exist outside of the beltway and the activist class anymore," said Mo Elleithee, a former Clinton aide and executive director of Georgetown University's Institute of Politics. "No one gives a shit about those labels. They want to know who is going to wake up every morning fighting for them and fighting to level the playing field."

   Clinton certainly has steadfast beliefs.

   But she's also more of a tactician than your full-hearted ideologue.

   Her theory of governance involves an implicit tradeoff: more legislation will get done but bolder stances — like coming out for marriage equality before it is more politically safe to do so — will be sacrificed.

   Thank God she's not a purist, eh? Just like our senior senator, whose brave stances disappear as a will-o'-the-wisp, and whose tradeoffs come far earlier in the game, sometimes even with the Good Housekeeping Seal of the other side.

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   1. How quickly we forget. Way back in 2008 when the dinosaurs roamed it was still political taboo for Dem pols to claim to be even mildy lefty. We were still in the era when Dems won by running as pro-business centrists until pretty much right now.

      That's what Obama and every other Dem outside of a safe very liberal district or state always ran as.  Bill Clinton and later HRC always ran as centrists. Obama not being white was seen as so threatening Team Obama bent over backwards to show how non-threatening, non-radical centrist he was. It's the GOP that's been falsely depicting Obama as a radical lefty all these years. He never sold himself as anything other than moderate.

      If not for Bernie that's how HRC would still be running. When she says… if you don't think I'm a real progressive you must not think President Obama, Joe Biden etc are real progressives, the answer is they never were progressives and neither were you until pressure from a come from nowhere Bernie Sanders made being progressive (Dems had already gone along with Rs on "liberal" being a dirty word so a new term had to be coined) a good thing for Dem pols to claim to be again.  

      This whole dog and pony show about how all these shiny new "progressives" were always "progressives" is pretty funny. In political time it's only been about 15 minutes that any of them would want to be connected with a word just a hair's breath away from "liberal" at all. I think it's fair to say that Bernie, being a socialist for God's sake, is the most "progressive" or whatever.  What a silly season argument.

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   2. Arguing "progressive" cred is difficult, as politicians have different approaches and wind up with different votes based, in part, on what they consider to be "doable."

      Clearly, Sanders is more liberal. How much more is the question. On actual votes during the overlapping time, he was THE most liberal Senator. Clinton trailed … and was the 11th most liberal. [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/3/31/1374629/-Hillary-Clinton-Was-the-11th-Most-Liberal-Member-of-the-Senate].

      If you support him, GREAT. Go out and demonstrate that he and his followers can create the sort of tidal wave of political action most of the changes he promises would require. Show how a progressive wave will reach 60 Senators and a majority in the House, if not in 2016, then in 2018. Do that, and pragmatists like me will cheerfully support him in the primaries and caucuses.

       

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3. Been watching the debates and I've got to say HRC is killing it in foreign policy and Commander in Chiefy stuff.  Bernie really doesn't seem to have put in much work in that area. He just keeps going back to how HRC was wrong back in 2002 on the Iraq War. He doesn't seem to know or care much about the details in the here and now.  

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