Tag: Hillary Clinton

I live in Washington State.  Our vote-by-mail primary is on February 19th, and the ballots were mailed out by the Secretary of State’s office a couple of days ago.  I’ll probably get mine on Monday.

The ballots were printed before Edwards suspended his campaign, so I know his name will still be on it.  And I’m going to vote for him.

Cross-posted from the Daily Kos.

(my original post at Kos needed a huge update because I inadvertently left out a big chunk of Obama’s proposals. This is the updated essay)

Even though I have a very strong personal opinion based on my position as an anti-war voter, I want to present both Obama’s and Clinton’s policy proposals on Native American issues.  

I believe that Amnesty International did a lot through its report, United States of America: Maze of Injustice: The failure to protect indigenous women from violence, and follow-up work with State and National legislators to give these issues more national attention.

So, whomever you support right now, all of this is great news. Below I have blockquoted each set of proposals from the Clinton and Obama campaigns. They are long, but I wanted to give you the complete statements.

The Democratic Party won, last night. The Republican race is growing increasingly acrimonious, with Mitt Romney yesterday accusing John McCain of using “Nixonian tactics,” while, by contrast, debate host CNN and others headlined the comity displayed by Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. This is great for the Democratic party, and helpful to both candidates.

As Senator Clinton said, in the debate itself:

So we have differences both at home and around the world, but, again, I would emphasize that what really is important here, because the Republicans were in California debating yesterday, they are more of the same.

Neither of us, just by looking at us, you can tell, we are not more of the same. We will change our country.

Big Tent Democrat concurs:

From the moment they walked out on the stage, an African American and a woman, the Democrats won. Whomever wins the nomination, whomever wins the election, Democrats won. And America won.

He referred to Eugene Robinson’s comment, during the post-debate analysis, that the most electrifying moment came when the two candidates simply walked out on the stage. This is a new America and a better America. I remember the electricity in 1984, when Walter Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running-mate; those at the San Francisco convention said it was palpable. Everyone knew the ticket was doomed to lose to media darling Ronald Reagan, but having a woman on a major party’s ticket was an achingly long-overdue revolution. That same year, Jesse Jackson won five primaries or caucuses. He won 13 in 1988. Even with the nation regressing, under the Reagan Administration, the Democratic Party was courageously moving forward.

This year makes the advances of 1984 seem trivial. Big Tent also referenced the withdrawal statement of John Edwards, when he announced he was getting out of the way of history. For all the subtle and not-so-subtle strains of racism and misogyny that have bubbled up, this past month, this nation will never look back. The next time there is a serious candidate who is African American and/or a woman, it won’t even be an issue. That will be the greatest legacy of this historic winter.

Don’t let the CNN decide which Candidates you see and hear.

Mike’s going to put the Network feed on a screen, stand in front with a pause button, and interject his answers and commentary. He’ll catch up  during the commercials. Alternative debate live stream 8PM Eastern, 5 Pacific.

With this morning’s announcement that John Edwards would be suspending his quest for the Democratic nomination for president, the media reform movement has also dropped out of the campaign.

Edwards was the only candidate to have directly addressed the problem of the media in this country. He recognized the danger of unregulated corporations controlling access to the media megaphone that all candidates and initiatives rely on if they harbor any hope of success. His own candidacy was a victim of the exclusionary predilections of Big Media.

Who will carry on the fight for media reform now that its strongest advocate in the race has withdrawn?

Brought to you by…

News Corpse

The Internet’s Chronicle Of Media Decay.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

In a stunning political development this evening according to the Associated Press, the Florida Supreme Court has intervened in the Florida Republican Primary and declared George W. Bush the winner over Mitt Romney, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee.

Senator John McCain, ever the patriot and loyal soldier, had this response

I knew in my heart of hearts that I’d never be able to win in a state full of geezers.  Even so, I’m delighted that the prize deservedly went to President Bush.  In anticipation of this development, I hopped on a plane to Washington, DC and personally congratulated the President. The voters of Florida have chosen wisely.

If you want to talk Democratic ideas, look no further than the Kennedy clan. They tend to be dismissed as People Magazine American Royalty, but that says more about our media than about them. With Senator Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy having endorsed Barack Obama, and with the Clinton campaign reminding voters that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend have already endorsed Hillary, the Kennedy family is back making headlines. That can only be a good thing.

The Clintons deserve credit for having made our national health care crisis a national issue, in the 1990s. Of course, their plan was a byzantine mess, and it didn’t go nearly far enough. For that matter, none of the current leading Democratic candidates advocate single-payer national health care, so they’re all offering but different flavors of incrementalism. No surprise. As I keep writing, despite the campaign rhetoric, they are all basically traditional Democratic centrists. Of course, as I also keep writing, even as the Democratic candidates approach the major issues with nothing revolutionary, the Republican candidates rarely even notice there are issues to approach. We can argue over the nuances of the incrementalist approaches of Senators Clinton, Edwards, and Obama, but if you want a good, cynical laugh, take a look at the Republican candidates’ approaches. But if you want to talk about vision and leadership on health care, look no further than Senator Kennedy. He wrote a book about it. In 1972. He’s been advocating for National Health Insurance since the 1970s. Among many other issues on which he has consistently been ahead of the times, he’s also been advocating for clean, renewable energy sources, since the 1970s. In our government, there is no greater champion for people, the environment, and innovative ideas than Senator Kennedy. And that has been the case for decades.

I’m also a particular fan of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I’ve long hoped he’d get involved in electoral politics, but I also understand the many and complex reasons for his not doing so. But my admiration of Kennedy has nothing to do with his father or his family; it has everything to do with his ideas. No one better articulates the rationale for environmentalism. The most common criticism of environmentalism is that it’s bad for the economy, and fundamentally opposed to capitalism. In a 2005 speech at the Sierra Club’s National Convention, Kennedy turned that around. Environmentalism is not only not bad for capitalism, it is a means of rescuing true free-market capitalism.

For the past week or so, the Clintons have demonstrated what a continuation of dynastic politics would be like in our federal government …a continuation of the divisive politics that has so characterized the past twenty years …Bush senior; Bill; W; and now, God forbid, Hill. America, the world cannot withstand another eight years of this type of politics. Nor can America live the next eight years in a foxhole as the Republicans, especially John McCain, would have us do. It is time for America to lift its sites, return to the time when America was indeed, the shinning light on the hill. America, as represented by our government, has a responsibility to its people and to the people of the world to rise above the fray and lead the world into the future. We cannot be that nation if we lower our sights to defending out of the Republican foxhole or bumbling along with stale ideas, ill-conceived policies, misspeaking and misunderstood presided-over by a two-headed leadership team. This country needs a singular voice to rally-around, who is responsible and capable of leading us into the future, mindful of the past but not constrained by its failures …a leader who is capable of bringing us along in quest of a higher vision for America and who accepts accountability for getting us there. The only acceptable choices are John Edwards and Barack Obama.

Tonight’s victory of Barack Obama was a lot bigger than anyone expected. Most pollsters expected a victory of around 10 points; only one predicted a victory of 20 points. While they correctly predicted the uptick in support for Edwards, they did not predict the huge margin of victory that Obama would take.

The X Factor in this race was the attacks of Bill Clinton on Obama this week. However, it turned out that these attacks created a huge backlash against Hillary and led to Obama’s unexpectedly wide margin. Obama’s victory will undoubtedly give him momentum going into the next race; however, the big question is how much?

The reason that I ask this question is because the next battle will be totally different than the four battles that came before it. In the previous four battles, the winner was the candidate who could do the best at practicing retail politics — this was a turf that clearly favored Obama. With his huge gift for oratory and his ability to draw some of the largest crowds ever for political campaigns, Barack Obama was able to generate the kind of grassroots support that propelled him to convincing wins in Iowa and South Carolina, a narrow loss in New Hampshire, and a tie in Nevada.

But this will be a totally different battle than the one before it, because it will be decided on the airwaves. Stump speeches will be important, but the candidates will have to try to appeal to audiences much bigger than the small audiences that they appealed to before. The battle will be won and lost based on who can create the best commercials that appeal to voters. So, if Obama cannot give people flashes of his oratorical skills in 30 seconds, then he will be in even more hot water than he is already — he trails by double digits in the all-important state of California. And that is on top of the fact that he is still trailing the delegate count to Hillary.

One of the key buzzwords of this Presidential race is change. The voices of change cumulated in a Democratic victory in 2006, and since then, the voices of change have only gotten louder and louder. Supposedly. And yet, when we look at the front-runners for the election, we see that the conventional candidates — Hillary Clinton and John McCain — are poised to take the nomination starting with Super Tuesday. A showing below 15% in South Carolina could doom John Edwards, while both Hillary and John McCain are leading by substantial margins in California. While the Republican primary is a lot messier than the Democratic primary, it seems that with his wins in South Carolina and Louisiana, Mike Huckabee’s home turf, it seems that McCain is an odds-on favorite to take over the Republican nomination.

This brings us to the question of change — do we really want change? The buzzword of this election has been change, yet we see the two establishment candidates, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, establishing themselves as frontrunners in the primary. It seems that people on both parties say that they want change, yet saying that they want change and actually having the courage to vote for change are two different things. It is a lot like a bad relationship — we say that we want to break up, yet when it comes time to actually do it, it is much more comfortable to stay in the relationship than it is to make a clean break and start over. We say that we don’t like where we are and want to move and make a fresh start; however, when it comes down to do it, we are more afraid of the unknown than we are of staying in a bad situation.