I've been hanging out here for some time, written a few little diaries and made quite a lot of comments without having provoked many people to anger. In fact, nearly all of these contributions have got recced by the odd person at least, so I feel reasonably welcomed.
I'm British.
So what am I doing hanging out on a US politics site? Well, my wife is American, and so are my now-adult stepchildren, and those stepchildren are still living in the USA, so I care about what happens to them.
The law about foreign involvement in politics is a bit different in the UK. Although she isn't allowed to vote in British elections, as a permanent resident my wife is allowed to be a political party member, so she gets to vote on who gets to be leader of the Liberal Democrats (and she's met and talked to most of the ones we've had over the last 20 years), so I don't think it's impertinent for me to at least offer opinions about who should lead the Democratic Party in the USA.
As the few of you who've noticed my presence may have gathered, I'm pretty much in the tank for Hillary.
I certainly wasn't in the tank for her in 2007-8. When I saw Obama's speech at the 2004 Convention, I said to myself that I'd just seen America's first black POTUS, and I was all in for him as soon as he announced. Not only was he exciting, HRC's campaign was simply awful. It was all about her entitlement to be the Dem nominee and her campaign was nasty, mean-minded and destructive. I hated her and I loved Obama.
Eight years on, she's served her conqueror loyally as SoS and she's become more relaxed as well as more confident. Being a furriner, I've seen her flitting about the globe and irritating horrid people and saying good things about important stuff. I find her now to be a seriously impressive person.
I'm not feeling the Bern because he's so boring. There's absolutely nothing revolutionary or interesting about middle-of-the-road social democracy to me: I've spent a lifetime in Liberal politics over here, so Bernie is just same-old, same-old from my policy perspective. I don't object to his policies (apart from them being a bit milquetoast for my taste), but they're nothing to set my pulse racing.
It's not as though Hillary is any better on the economic issues, by the way. I don't think she's quite as bought and paid for as the anti-Hillary crowd allege, but she's friendlier with the big-money crowd than I care for.
If there were a serious prospect of a Democratic House majority post-2016, I might approach things rather differently, but frankly, there isn't. With any serious economic advances requiring at least the House's consent, I don't think the next President is going to get very far on the economy, and it's even arguable that HRC's mildly centre-right positions have a better chance of gaining traction with the few sane Republicans than Bernie's mildly centre-left ones.
And that's where my big beef with the Bern is. His initial brushes with PoCs were less than successful because he starts from the premise that if we fix economic injustice, everything else follows. That, to me, is too one-dimensional, too complacent and too managerial. It's what turns me off about social democrats.
My creed is Liberalism. The preamble to the old Liberal Party's constitution is still my statement of belief. "The Liberal Party exists to build a free and fair society in which none shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity ... and in all spheres we set freedom first." That's not "freedumb" in the "Freedumb Corkers" sense: it's the ability of each and every human being to make significant choices in the sure and certain knowledge that basic needs like education and health care are provided as of right. We oppose concentrations of power, whether at the central government level, at the corporate level or any other.
Now, being a highly-paid white male, my perspective is necessarily clouded. I can't really say I understand what it's like to be poor or discriminated against. I know there are issues I'm insensitive about.
But what really impresses me about Hillary is her passion for human rights. She doesn't approach issues of women's rights, race, education or health from the economic base Bernie favours: she stands up for human dignity simply because people are human. That's the Liberal approach rather than the Social Democracy approach.
To me, where she's coming from is better suited to undermining the intellectual legitimacy of the Conservative line. The Republican Party these days is flatly inhuman. It is intolerant, it is anti-science, anti-freedom, anti-democracy and anti-thought. Destroying them, which has to be America's number one priority, requires destroying the assumptions which underpin their every loathsome view.
Arguments about whether the minimum wage should be $15/hr in 2017 or 2020 and whether it should be the same in all 50 states are not arguments about fundamentals: they are arguments about tactics, not strategy.
Saying that the Republicans are the party of economic injustice doesn't go far enough for me, and that's all I see Bernie saying.
I know Hillary's flawed, but when it comes down to what's important about a person as a person rather than an economic cog, I'm completely convinced that she's coming from where I do. And given that POTUS is an immensely influential figure in global terms, I'm far more confident that HRC will re-establish a positive moral dimension to America's global exercise of power.
("Oh, but she's a warmonger." I'm not convinced. I think she's more hawkish than I'd like, but I don't think she's actually keen on military options. I also think she's felt to some extent that she has to be hawkish because a woman can't be seen as being a wimp and retain confidence as a C-in-C.)
Over the next 8 years, the fight is going to be against Republicanism. No-one is better at making Republicans look awful, at exposing their poverty of ideas, their poverty of spirit and their poverty of decency than Hillary, because she attacks their entire conceptual base in a way Bernie only scratches.
I'm going to end by quoting the beginning of a reasonably lengthy extract from Gloria Steinem's new book published in today's Guardian, which crystallized for me what it is about Clinton 2015 (rather than Clinton 2007) that excites me:
I once introduced her to a thousand women in a hotel ballroom. Standing behind her as she spoke, I could see the binder on the lectern with her speech carefully laid out – and also that she wasn’t reading from it. Instead, she was responding to people who had spoken before her, addressing activists and leaders she saw in the audience, and putting their work in a national and global context – all in such clear and graceful sentences that no one would have guessed she hadn’t written them in advance. It was an on-the-spot tour de force, perhaps the best I’ve ever heard.
But what clinched it for me was listening to her speak after a performance of Eve Ensler’s play Necessary Targets, based on interviews with women in one of the camps set up to treat women who had endured unspeakable suffering, humiliation, and torture in the ethnic wars within the former Yugoslavia. To speak to an audience that had just heard these heartbreaking horrors seemed impossible for anyone, and Hillary had the added burden of representing the Clinton administration, which had been criticised for slowness in stopping this genocide. Nonetheless, she rose in the silence, with no possibility of preparing, and began to speak quietly – about suffering, about the importance of serving as witnesses to suffering. Most crucial of all, she admitted this country’s slowness in intervening. By the time she sat down, she had brought the audience together and given us all a shared meeting place: the simple truth.
I want that human being in the White House.