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Today’s Hillary News & Views begins with my favorite Clinton interview of the cycle, courtesy of a whipsmart young woman who has already enacted social change at the age of eleven.
Marley Dias interviews Clinton for Elle:
When I was really little, I wanted to be our first woman president. I always knew I want to be the kind of grownup who makes people's lives better. And since that's pretty much the job of the President of the United States, it seemed like a good idea.
But I've realized that you don't have to be very old to start trying to fix the problems you see in the world around you. (I'm 11.) That's why I created #1000BlackGirlBooks, a book drive to collect stories about young black girls. I wanted to be represented in books and show people that it's possible to create spaces to be seen and represented.
Hillary Clinton is someone who's never waited around for someone else to do the hard work. She's been an organizer and a change-maker for her whole life practically. But people don't really talk a lot about what she did when she was a kid like me. It turns out she's always been an activist. She's always wanted to make a difference.
Here’s my favorite exchange:
Tell me about a time that someone took credit for something you did, and how did you deal with it?
I'll tell you another story from high school. When I was a senior, I ran for class president. And I lost. One of my opponents even told me I was "really stupid" if I thought a girl could be elected president. Fine. But then the boy who won asked me to be the chair of the Organizations Committee. This meant that he got to be president, but I had to do most of the work.
I said yes anyway – and it turned out to be a lot of fun, because I got to plan all the events I would have pushed for as president. (One of them was a mock presidential debate, if you can believe that!) In the end, I've always found credit isn't just something you take – it's something people give you when they see how hard you're working.
Two excellent writers reflect on the interview above.
Rebecca Schoenkopf writes for Wonkette:
The first time I realized how Hillary Clinton is Just Like Us (except for all the parts where she is fancy and stuff) was when
she wrote to thank a young woman for blogging about her — the young woman’s, that is — herpes.
Clinton thanked Ella Dawson both for helping to “decrease the stigma” surrounding sexually transmitted infections, and for not being cowed by the MRA dicks who are doing their best to get her to kill herself. It was just such a cool, sex-positive, feminists-fuck-yeah letter. “Hillary Clinton is a good person,” I thought.
We all talk about how bad Hillary Clinton is at the “be a political person” thing, but every time she writes to a young woman, I want to cry with how good it is, how real and connecting and sweet.
And today, is the best yet: Hillary Clinton’s email interview with Marley Dias, the 11-year-old girl who started #1000blackgirlbooks.
Their conversation goes on, and Clinton is so easy with her. She simplifies her language a bit but never condescends; she talks about things like “SHIT MAYA ANGELOU’S LIFE WAS FUCKED UP SON!” but does it in a way that expects a smart child doesn’t need to be shielded, and that painful things can have beauty and worth; she talks about some mortifying times with her hair in junior high. She tells poems to a little girl. It’s just sweet and chatty and best-grandma, the one who doesn’t talk down to you or hide the facts of life from you, but trusts you will be able to understand.
Melissa McEwan writes for Shareblue:
“It’s good to be ambitious.” Those are five deceptively powerful words. They are words that girls and women rarely hear, and to hear them from a woman who is on the precipice of breaking into the biggest, baddest boys’ club on the planet is quite special.
Clinton knows the cost of being an ambitious woman. Her entire life has required her to forge ahead on a path flanked on both sides by people shouting at her that she is too ambitious. Naturally, those are not the words they use: They use words like “entitled” and “imperious” and “who does she think she is?” and “b*tch.” And the powerful people launch investigations and crowds chant “lock her up.” And worse.
She knows the creeping self-doubt that springs forth from seeds of discouragement, planted by sinister opposition. And thus she knows how important it is not just to help blaze the trail, but to call to those behind her: It is good to come this way.
I love that she is telling girls (and all the rest of us who may need to hear it) that ambition is not a dirty word.
Salon decimates the “two unpopular candidates” narrative:
There’s another way that the “unpopular candidates” meme gets things wrong and that’s when it comes to race and ethnicity. As reported by Becky Hofstein Grady, a SurveyMonkey election tracking poll of more than 91,000 registered voters in August clearly showed that Clinton was not unpopular with nonwhite voters.
In short, Clinton is only unpopular with whites, more unpopular than Trump by a good margin, in fact. So the meme is also a way of cloaking unacknowledged racial animus, a sentiment that Bill Clinton famously co-opted with his “Sister Souljah moment,” but that Hillary apparently can’t avoid.
Not only is it misleading to think of “popularity” without considering race; it’s also misleading to think of race alone. People are more complex than that, both individually and in social groups. Which is why pollsters and political scientists try to understand demographic groups. And here we find yet another way in which Trump’s unpopularity truly stands out as different and distinctive.
n May, Gallup interviewed more than 11,600 Americans, at which time Clinton had a 40 percent to 33 percent advantage in favorability rating — figures not dissimilar to those in more recent polls. On May 27, Frank Newport reported on the demographic breakdown behind those broad numbers.Of the 62 demographic subgroups Gallup identified — “a wide variety of population segments created by various combinations of race and ethnicity, gender, education, religion, region of residence, income and marital status” — Clinton had higher approval ratings than Trump in 47 groups and Trump had higher approval ratings in just 13, while 2 were tied. What’s more, Clinton had a 50 percent approval or better among 14 different groups.
Tampa Bay Times endorses:
These are anxious times. Americans are concerned about economic stagnation, terrorism and spasms of gun violence. A chaotic presidential campaign has not improved the national mood. But this remains a resilient nation determined to pursue a brighter future, and there is a clear way forward to renew our common bonds and build upon the gains of these last eight years.
Hillary Clinton is the only candidate for president with the values, experience and knowledge to meet the challenges at home and abroad. Donald Trump is stunningly unprepared and temperamentally unfit for the presidency, and he has played upon our deepest fears and worst impulses with reckless rhetoric, wild promises and flagrant disregard for the truth. His bombast makes for entertaining television, but it is not suited for the Oval Office.
Clinton would continue the encouraging trend lines that show household incomes are up and poverty is down. She offers detailed plans for targeted tax breaks, investments in infrastructure, clean energy incentives and robust job training. She would improve the Affordable Care Act that has brought health coverage to millions. She would support women and families by boosting early childhood education, closing the pay gap and supporting reproductive freedom.
PennLive endorses:
This isn't a normal election year. The two major party candidates who are dueling for the White House are not normal candidates.
And the choice between them is so stark that there is really no choice at all.
Republican Donald Trump is a blowhard and a bully who holds outdated views on women and ethnic, racial and religious minorities; embraces a dangerous approach to global affairs; espouses potentially destructive ideas on global trade and the economy, and possesses no identifiable governing philosophy and even less experience.
Democrat Hillary Clinton has the steady temperament, inclination to compromise and the requisite deep and nuanced understanding of domestic and foreign affairs uniquely suited to provide continuity and stability to American governance at a time of uncertainty at home and increasing danger abroad.
She, unlike Trump, embraces a positive and forward-thinking vision for a nation that works together to address its shared challenges and celebrates its mutual triumphs.
FiveThirtyEight reports on the state of the race:
Gary Johnson averaged just 7 percentage points in 11 polls1 released on Thursday, continuing a string of bad results for the Libertarian Party nominee. At the same time, the number of undecided voters appears to be falling. Those two trends are combining to remove some of the uncertainty in our forecasts — historically, the number of undecided and third-party voters has been strongly correlated with both polling volatility and polling error. The share of voters not supporting the major-party candidates remains higher than it was at this point in the 2012 campaign, for example, but the more it shrinks, the safer Hillary Clinton’s lead becomes.
With more voters committed to one of the two major-party nominees, Trump simply has fewer people he can appeal to in order to make up his current deficit, which makes Clinton’s lead more secure. A 5-percentage-point lead with about 15 percent of the electorate undecided or voting for a third-party candidate (about where the race currently stands) is far better than a 5-point lead with over 20 percent of the electorate undecided or voting for a third-party candidate (about where the race was in mid-June). That’s part of the reason that Clinton’s chances of winning the election are in the upper 70s now, while they were in the low 70s back in June.
To illustrate this, let’s cut the number of third-party and undecided voters in half, distributing them equally between Clinton and Trump. In that scenario, our model would peg Clinton as a stronger favorite. Instead of winning 78 percent of the time in our polls-only forecast, she would win 85 percent of the time. In our nowcast, which projects the results in a hypothetical election held today, Clinton’s chances jump from 86 percent to 93 percent. And in our polls-plus forecast — our most conservative model — Clinton’s chances go from 75 percent to 80 percent.
The clear uptick in Clinton’s odds in these scenarios is worth keeping in mind as we head into the second debate on Sunday. Although Clinton would benefit from a wider margin between Trump and herself, she would also benefit if more voters made up their mind — even if those undecideds split evenly between the major-party nominees. The opposite is true for Trump. He would benefit if he could shrink the margin, but he should at the very least hope to make voters think twice before committing to either candidate.
Michelle Obama is still the closer...and her garden will go on.
New York Times reports:
Four taps of the microphone were all Michelle Obama needed to take down Donald J. Trump.
“Hillary Clinton is tough,” Mrs. Obama, the first lady, told a crowd of several thousand in Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday. “See,” she continued, “I’ve watched her when she gets knocked down — she doesn’t complain. She doesn’t cry foul.”
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
It took a second for the audience to catch on: Mrs. Obama was mocking Mr. Trump’s complaint that a faulty microphone had hindered his performance in his first presidential debate with Mrs. Clinton. But as Mrs. Obama continued — “No, she gets right back up, comes back stronger” — the mostly young and heavily African-American crowd let out a deafening howl.
They called her “the closer” during Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, like a go-to relief pitcher used sparingly but with devastating effect. Mrs. Obama preferred spending time with her daughters over attending political rallies. But when she was unleashed before a pivotal caucus or primary, her story of growing up on the South Side of Chicago and falling in love with a young community organizer had an unmatched, almost magical power to turn out voters, campaign officials discovered.
Eight years later, Mrs. Obama is playing a similar role for the woman whom she helped her husband defeat in that race.
Politico reports:
If Hillary Clinton wins the White House in November, first lady Michelle Obama's vegetable garden will live on.
Official word from the Clinton campaign came right as Obama held her last biannual garden harvest with school children on the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday.
"If elected, the Clintons look forward to continuing the garden on the White House grounds, which produces not only healthy food, but also a great educational opportunity for youth from all over the country," Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said in an email to POLITICO. "We hope First Lady Michelle Obama would come back for the plantings and harvests."
An interesting article on “Obama Bros” from Politico:
Clinton campaign officials credit them with having a huge hand in shaping the narrative of the race. “Most of it is organic, these guys are guerrilla,” said Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri. “I watch for what they’re saying to see where a story line will be going. It’s reassuring to me, because they are no bedwetters, and the rare times they say, ‘I’m not so sure,’ I take notice of that more so than from anyone else.”
Palmieri said the campaign’s most effective messengers are converts to the cause, and that the support from a group of Democratic operatives who tried to defeat Clinton eight years ago is helpful “in terms of our own morale. To have people who have been through it before, pulling you up and beating back the haters — that has been a big help to all of us.”
From the Clinton perspective, they are also the antidote to David Axelrod, Obama’s former senior strategist who has been quick to point out flaws and give unsolicited public advice about when he thinks the campaign is veering off course.
For Favreau, at least, there is some penance driving him, in addition to his gut-level fear of Trump.“I started off my political career not liking her very much at all,” he said of Clinton. “I developed a very different view of her in the White House, and thought we might have helped contribute, during the 2008 race, to the caricature of her that so many people have right now.” Today, he calls her “an extraordinarily talented, brilliant public servant who should be president.”
Orton Ndau writes for Huffington Post:
In June 2016, I left my position as an associate at a law firm in New York City to join Secretary Hillary Clinton’s campaign for President of the United States.
Shortly after I started at the campaign, the Alton Sterling and Philando Castile shootings occurred. This type of violence has been going on my whole life, but those two shootings finally broke my ability to separate my professional life from my private emotions about the injustices suffered by Blacks based on our race.
As a consequence, the day after the Castile shooting, I decided to wear Black Lives Matter t-shirts every day for the remainder of the campaign.
When I began wearing my Black Lives Matter t-shirts, the outward response from my team— especially my immediate supervisors—and other staffers at the campaign was overwhelmingly positive. If there were any negative feelings about my t-shirt campaign, I was not aware of them.
Actually, as a result of my t-shirt campaign, I’ve had discussions that I may not have had, and I’ve learned things that I may not have learned about myself and others. But most importantly, I found the courage to assert my Blackness in my professional life. Now, it is clear to me that we stay shackled in the status quo if we never discuss how different people are treated differently in America.
Petula Dvorak writes for Washington Post:
A woman her age is supposed to be invisible. But Hillary Clinton, who is 68, refuses to disappear — and there is no shortage of people who despise her for it.
There’s misogyny, and then there’s the ageist misogyny that older women face. That undercurrent runs very deep in our culture, and it’s one of the reasons the haters hate Hillary Clinton so deeply.
No one has talked about this much, but it’s a very real phenomenon in this election.
The presidential nominee is confounding America because she represents a demographic that our culture secretly dislikes: older women.
Everyone is guilty — even women themselves. Earlier polls showed that women Clinton’s age supported her, but younger women overwhelmingly supported Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Maybe a wise grandpa made sense to them. But grandma? In the Oval Office? Shaking their heads. Does. Not. Compute.
America worships youthful femininity, and our pop culture, if not our policies, idolizes mom. But what do we do with women once they’re not in either of those roles?
We minimize and ignore them.
The older, wise woman has rarely had a starring role in the American story, beyond grandma and her cookies.
Jamil Smith writes for MTV:
LeBron James, the Cleveland Cavaliers superstar, published an op-ed on Sunday night declaring his support for the Democratic nominee. Calling her a “champion for children” and promoting a “message of hope and unity” regarding gun and police violence in African-American neighborhoods, James made an affirmative case for Clinton while taking a couple of implicit shots at Donald Trump. “Only one person running truly understands the struggles of an Akron child born into poverty,” James wrote. “And when I think about the kinds of policies and ideas the kids in my foundation need from our government, the choice is clear. That candidate is Hillary Clinton.”
Like the consumer products to which he lends his name and image, James plainly sees something in all of this for his interests — not money so much as a better future for the young students who benefit from his foundation’s work. “She wants to make sure kids have access to a good education, no matter what zip code they live in,” he wrote.
In that sense, Clinton is a means for James to further his off-court goals for his hometown of Akron and the rest of the greater Cleveland area. As much as we Cavaliers fans believe in LeBron’s ability, he wants every American to believe that Clinton can and will do what she promises — particularly for African-American communities — with the implied demand to pressure her if she doesn’t.
That is no small thing to ask in the wake of another rash of police killings, from Terence Crutcher to Keith Scott to Carnell Snell Jr., in the weeks leading into the final stretch of the campaign. The lack of justice voters of color have seen emerging from these cases has led to a lot of cynicism, and many have removed themselves from the electoral process entirely. It is an understandable reaction, but one that plays into the hands of people like Trump — the enemies of the equality and peace these communities seek. James’s choice to stand with Hillary Clinton is an argument against that loss of faith.
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Crossposted at HillaryHQ, an independent, progressive blog committed to the electing Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States.