Hillary Clinton and the Northern Strategy [View all]

[kenn3d]

For decades now, we liberals have been shaking our heads in wonder at the working stiffs who give the rich pashas atop the GOP their votes. There’s hardly a liberal alive who can’t recite what’s the matter with Kansas: the parable of the downtrodden whites in their double-wides, so enraged by their dwindling slice of the American pie that they vote for hucksters who vow to keep Negro hands off their lily white daughters, homosexual hands off their wedding cakes, Mexican-rapist hands off their orchards, atheist hands off their crèches, guvmint hands off their assault weapons. The hucksters, with the votes in hand, go off to D.C. and sock it to the suckers who sent them there—shipping their jobs abroad, rigging the tax code against them, gutting their schools, taking swipes at their Social Security and Medicare. It’s not that the con men don’t throw the rubes some nourishing scraps. They block a bill to register firearms here, pass a Defense of Marriage Act there, decry the War on Christmas with their fellow shriekers on Fox. Donald John Trump is just the latest in a long parade of flimflammers to adopt the Southern Strategy. His only innovations are speaking bluntly rather than in code and cranking up the volume. It’s a pitiful farce, no?

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Ask a group of liberals what they want in a candidate, and you’ll get a sketch of a champion who will fight for income equality, rein in big banks, defeat ruinous trade agreements, restore our battered civil liberties, look to diplomacy before war, and stop the devastation of our climate. Sure enough, in every election year Democratic candidates come along peddling such wares...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/22/hillary-clinton-and-the-northern-strategy/