If elected President, which of these Democrats...

[Ken Burch]

67. He ran on "ending welfare as we know it"-not on throwing poor people to the wolves.

He could have interpreted "reform" to mean that we would make the programs better, that we would actually listen to the poor and what they say they need to get off welfare(almost all of them have wanted to get off of welfare, and most aren't on it for all that long), and he could have pushed to replace simple benefits(most of which were too small to help anyone)with free job training, with jobs programs that put people to work rebuilding their neighborhoods, and with lower-cost access to higher education.

The voters wanted to fix a broken system-they weren't baying for the blood of the poor. The things I've talked about in the first paragraph would probably have saved money, and brought in more revenue as well, since they would have resulted in many of the poor getting into work in which they'd have actually earned enough to pay taxes.

And Clinton could have used his own story to change the debate on that issue. As president, he had the visibility and the capacity to alter the terms of the discussion. He didn't have to assume that most voters hated the poor and wanted them punished.

The lesson of the Nineties was that Democrats have an obligation to stand with the powerless, and cannot prosper when they refuse to do so. Yes, Clinton was elected as a Democrat...but in the end, he pretty much did what Bush would have done in his second term(other than on reproductive rights and...well, that was pretty much it-he created a few national parks, but that was trivial. And even on reproductive rights, Clinton then-and we can assume HRC would be the same now-still bought into the narrative that women who had abortions should be shamed for doing so and that, in general, wealthy white men are perfectly entitled to judge and condemn the morality of women, especially poor women, and especially especially poor women who happen to be guilty of CWB-Conceiving While Black).

A vote for HRC is a vote to go back to all of this. There's no excuse for that kind of a program of retreat.