Riding off Hillary Clinton’s comments in the Brooklyn debate last night, a must-read for all Democrats, from Jon Schwarz at The Intercept: Barack Obama, from his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, on how big donors and their donations affected him:
I can’t assume that the money chase didn’t alter me in some ways. …
Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means — law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured by a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and antigun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment.
[...]
Still, I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population — that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for every senator: The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions. You may fight it, with town hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old neighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent.
A moment to reflect on that: “But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent.”
Hillary Clinton, along with her former president husband Bill, have been in that orbit for decades. Increasingly so, via the Clinton Foundation, and their $150 million+ speech-selling industry.
Continuing from the book, on how the years of being in that sphere, and the big-money fundraising further, alienates:
The path of least resistance — of fund-raisers organized by the special interests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops — starts to look awfully tempting, and if the opinions of these insiders don’t quite jibe with those you once held, you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning the ropes. The problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be fought.
“...you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning the ropes.”
That’s basically Hillary Clinton’s platform.
Meanwhile:
Bernie Sanders Does His Own Laundry (and Grocery Shopping): Inside the Family Life of the Down-to-Earth Democratic Candidate
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Yet in his heart and home the Vermont senator remains the same down-to-earth "Bernster" – as his son, Levi, lovingly refers to him – he's always been. And that much was plain to see when PEOPLE stopped by to visit Sanders and his family at his modest colonial home in Burlington, Vermont, last month. [...]
The 74-year-old Democratic socialist from Brooklyn leads a simple home life indeed. He does his own grocery shopping and grilling, sticking to a diet of mostly meat and vegetables. "He was Paleo before Paleo was a thing," says Jane's other daughter, Carina Driscoll.
He also chops his own firewood and can be handy around the house – just not, as Jane puts it, "with a lot of attention to aesthetics." He once tacked new screening onto a window frame without cutting away the excess, she recalls, "so we had a window with a tutu. And he said, 'Well, it works!' "
