"Vote for Hillary or else!" [View all]

[JackRiddler]

Last edited Wed Aug 7, 2013, 09:47 AM - Edit history (1)

(Clarification: Based on how many people around here are talking today, that's the mentality we will see expressed if Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic Party nominee for president in 2016. Some in fact have already begun to say that Clinton is both inevitable and necessary as the candidate, so the rest of us should accept it.)

This is the way of thinking that got the Republican House elected in 2010. The genuine popular movement that had been so successful in electing Obama in 2008 was directed to go home and watch on TV while the policy reins were suddenly handed over to neoliberal class warriors like Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers (old miscreants of vacuous power politics who had not been forefronted during the campaign). Under Geithner's management the bailout of the banks directly responsible for the economic crash was completed, so that they were made more powerful than ever, while foreclosures of underwater homeowners proceeded apace. Incredibly a primary criminal from the Bush regime's aggressive war on Iraq (Robert Gates, who oversaw "the surge," former Iran-Contra criminal) was kept on as secretary of war.

The Democratic administration in power no longer presented a distinctive alternative to the destructive policies of the Bush regime, but actually adopted and worked to evolve many of these, including the perpetual global war and, as we have since discovered, warrantless mass surveillance of the American people. In its relations with the left the 2010 Democratic election campaign abandoned positive programmatic messaging for rote threats that if the other guys won it would be much worse. Despite Democratic control of the Congress, major policy initiatives were watered down to woo Republicans, even though the latter maintained a no-compromise front that absurdly painted a pro-industry health insurance reform act and a laughably ineffective attempt to re-impose regulation on the criminal banking sector as the advent of Stalinism.

A vacuum was created for the Tea Party Republican astroturfing operation to profile itself as something "revolutionary," the only real "movement" happening. Not surprisingly, this intentional move to the right, coupled with the expectation of obedience among voting clienteles as though they belong to the Democratic Party as a matter of its privilege, failed to mobilize the Democratic left but also failed to inspire the independent voter with the thought that there were clear alternatives from which to choose. A self-made disaster followed for the Democrats at the midterm polls, although this was also a product of gerrymandering (as the Democratic share of the vote nationwide was actually equal to the Republican).

Perhaps a similar scenario is now being set up by those who support the well-known champion of neoliberalism and "humanitarian" imperialist wars, Hillary Clinton, as the candidate in 2016. Given the awesome scale of the real ecological, economic and political crises confronting the world (almost none of which are being addressed in the predominant US political discourse with its obsessive focus on personal trivialities) we need imaginative and bold alternatives. Yet a lazy political cadre wish to present yet another dynastic avatar who was a stale act, right wing in spirit and void of ideas, already back when she first rose to prominence in the 1990s.