Sunday, April 17, 2016

Imagined Futures 2 - If Hillary Clinton Wins

If Hillary Clinton wins the nomination she will face the immediate task of pulling together the Democrats who differed on her and Bernie Sanders candidacies  so she can win in November,  not only to win but try to win big enough to take the Senate and in our more remote hopes, the House.

That will depend on her having genuinely learned something from Bernie Sanders' impressive level of support and it will also, to a large extent, depend on Bernie Sanders' being effective in any negotiations with Hillary Clinton.  While such a negotiation should not necessarily be for public consumption and certianly not for the public gloating of staffers and hangers on to the Clinton and Sanders campaigns, I would guess it might include guarantees of who will be appointed and who will not be appointed to, especially the financial positions in a Hillary Clinton administration.  Both sides will have to be realistic about that and they will always have to keep in mind that if the Republicans win, entirely worse people will be in all positions.   I think it may be necessary for Hillary Clinton to nominate a Vice President who has been more liberal than she has been.   I have heard talk of the possibility of Sherrod Brown,  I'm not sure if I think it would be a good idea in that it would make the task of retaking the Senate more difficult, though I think he would likely be a great president himself. If she did choose him, I think the combination of the two would be the most qualified top of the ticket in many decades.

If Hillary Clinton wins the election in November she will have to learn the lesson that Barack Obama so notably did not in 2010, that a Democratic president, facing the unprecedented obstruction of the Republican-fascists of today, needs to have Democratic control of both houses to make anything happen and to fend off the discouragement that failure brings.  If Barack Obama had delivered on the promise of his presidency in 2009, with a Democratic Senate and House, we wouldn't be talking about a Bernie Sanders candidacy in 2016 because the failure of Obama to appoint reformers to financial posts and his absurd desire to have the Republicans like him is why he chose to cripple his own presidency.   If she retains any illusions about having people like Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner,  Larry Summers or Eric Holder in her administration she should reconsider because such people are the reason that the Democrats lost in a year they should have won easily if Barack Obama had delivered the level of reform he promised.

I think a good part of Barack Obama's failure is due to his personality.   He is a preppy jock who was a star at Harvard Law,  which could bring me to the horrible appointment of Arne Duncan who was totally unsuited to be the Secretary of Education, overseeing a public school system when he'd never set foot in a public school as a student even once in his life.   But I think Barack Obama's sense of male prerogatives, as that in virtually every single one of his predecessors as president, were a big part of his self-diminution of his own potential.   I  think he was entirely too full of himself and his ability to win over Republicans who used that to weaken him.  You can recall the negotiations with the two phony-moderate Senators of my state, Snowe and Collins if you want to review.

Hillary Clinton, who has had the full treatment of the Republican-fascist, corporate sponsored hate campaign for going on three decades will enter the office without the illusions that her enemies will be won over.  She will be prepared as no president since, I would guess, Lincoln was to face the full storm of such a campaign, again.  I also think that she will not feel her womanhood is on the line in any decisions she takes, though she will know that one of the avenues of attack will be her gender as certainly as Barack Obama's race was in those made on him.   Perhaps it is there that she will understand that her success depends far more on the wing of the Democratic Party which is entirely skeptical of the ability of the United States to dominate on the basis of military might.  I think she should have learned in this nomination process what Barack Obama obviously never understood, that a Democratic President needs the support the Democrats and others who Obama's first Chief of Staff derided as "girly men".  If she needs a reminder of that, she should look at how that asshole is doing as Mayor of Chicago and what that has done to the Democratic Party there.

Having Hillary Clinton as President could be one of the greatest opportunities that the United States has ever had to change things.  She will almost certainly have appointments to the Supreme Court and other courts that could change the direction of that branch for decades.   I would hope that her first priority in that is to abolish the abominable doctrine of corporate person hood, if I were president that would be an absolute requirement in making any judicial appointments, that the candidate must believe that product of the corrupt Gilded Era court must be struck down as one of the greatest of all dangers to democracy and government of, by and for The People.  It also endangers the entire species as can be seen in the corporate lie campaign that has stalled the abandonment of fossil fuels and practices that are destroying our world.  The revelations that oil company scientists informed oil  executives of that, perhaps as long ago as the Nixon administration proves that they are a class of criminally insane crackpots who are willing to do in slow motion what the most insane advocates of nuclear war were willing to get over quickly.   And they are willing to do it for money.  That is the danger we face, a world in the hands of those people, at the mercy of those people or a world in which life can continue, in which human life can continue and in which democracy is possible.

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