Secretary Clinton must honor her party’s platform because she has secured the support of progressives favoring Senators Sanders and Warren by agreeing to include nearly the entire progressive agenda in the platform, even where specific planks are more progressive than the position she held at the start of the campaign. If she reneges on those promises, she would incur the wrath of progressives and risk being dumped by the party in 2020. Hillary is smart and will not do that. She has read the consensus among loyal Democrats and will abide by it if she succeeds in taking office.
Did you wonder why it was so easy for progressives to get everything they wanted? She didn’t have to do that, but she did. I’m starting to hear more historical accounts of Hillary’s views in the past, long before she was a senator from New York. She started her legal career as an advocate for children’s rights. As First Lady, she went to a conference in Beijing and made waves as a champion for women’s and children’s rights. If we look back, we can see lots of other evidence that she is basically a progressive and will be sympathetic toward progressive legislation and do all she can to get it through Congress. Just because she didn’t come out early for a $15 per hour minimum wage doesn’t mean that she’s not on board with it now. The same thing goes for other issues, like income inequality. Did you hear that line in her acceptance speech about taxing the wealthy more? She didn’t say stuff like that before she was nominated. It appears that we are beginning to see her true colors.
Hillary is no “loose cannon”. She shuts up and maintains discipline when she can’t win. When her husband was the newly-elected President, she convinced him to allow her to push for universal health care with a single-payer, “public option” for those who could not afford expensive premiums. The insurance companies went crazy because they knew this would put them out of business by replacing their golden goose with a national health care system like those in all other developed countries. Bill didn’t really care about it at all and allowed “conservaDems” like Max Baucus to team up with other people who had been bought by the insurance companies, such as all the callous, mean-spirited Republicans, and killed “Hillary care”. Bill told her to back off once her ideas were slapped down, and she did for the rest of his presidency.
Today, I heard that she had strongly advocated against NAFTA to her husband before he got it passed by Congress. Bill told her to cool it and she did. She wasn’t president and he was. Is it any wonder that she came around so easily to opposing TPP once Bernie made that a reasonable notion? She’s even talking about reforming NAFTA now. She seems pretty progressive to me now, more than she was eight years ago.
Hillary Clinton became a senator from New York by playing ball with the big business interests in New York City. In the Senate, she positioned herself to become president. She put her personal progressive agenda on hold, so we didn’t hear a peep out of her about health care. She had bigger fish to fry, and she steadily built a base of support for her big push for the presidency in 2008.
In that election, the national consensus was about being “tough” on foreign policy. The progressive agenda took a back seat to frenzied hand-waving about a lot of crap that didn’t matter at all. Barack Obama came out of nowhere and overwhelmed her carefully-constructed plan with panache and verve. People have forgotten that in that race, she was the more progressive candidate, and die-hard health care advocates were for her, not Barack, once people like Dennis Kucinich were out of the picture. We knew that Obama would not push for universal health as Hillary was likely to do, but once he had the nomination, progressives had to vote for him and hope that they could get something.
During the campaign, all Obama ever said was “affordable health insurance”. He never advocated a single-payer system, nor did he allow progressives to gear up and fight for it. Instead, he silently allowed Senator Baucus, an infamous shill for the insurance, medical and pharmaceutical industries, to kill single-payer health care. Hillary didn’t say much, despite her history of advocacy for health care. It wasn’t her place as a senator from New York beholden to many of those same corporate interests.
So, by 2009, with health care pretty much a dead issue and a no-win platform for any national politician, Hillary is wondering how to get out of being a stooge for the big money people in New York. She had expected to sweep into the Oval Office, but losing out to Obama destroyed that plan. As consolation prizes to his main primary rivals, Clinton and Joe Biden, Barack offered up two plum jobs, Vice President and Secretary of State. He gave Joe first pick and he took the VP spot, so Hillary was offered State. She took it because she wanted out of New York.
She must have hoped that being in charge of executing foreign policy would maintain her presence as a national figure. There was a big down side to being a cabinet officer rather than president. She had to implement Obama’s policies, not make her own. At home, she was an advisor rather than a policy maker, and her portfolio was foreign relations, not progressive social issues. Abroad, she was an ambassador, negotiating on behalf of the president and executing his policy, not her own.
After four years of this kind of fetch-and-carry work, Hillary had had enough of being Barack’s flunky and started to build a new plan to become president. She got off to a slow start and let another newcomer to the national scene, Bernie Sanders, surge into prominence and steal her thunder as the champion of progressive causes. She didn’t “out-progressive” Bernie in the primaries because (1) that would just about be impossible to do and (2) her well-oiled political machine didn’t want her to go too far too the left and alienate “mainstream” voters, which would likely hand the election to the Republicans.
Now, here’s where it gets cute. In addition to torpedoing the careers of regular Republican jerkwads like Jeb Bush and John Kasich, guys who might have been able to beat Clinton, the unexpected nomination of an obstreperous goofball named Donald J. Trump has cleared the way for Hillary Clinton to be just about as progressive as she can stand to be to solidify solidly progressive Democrats, like the Sanders and Warren boosters, while still being the “reasonable alternative” to the bloviating psychopath heading the ticket for the other major party.
Got it yet? Even if someone watches Fox News and has no idea how stupid it is to oppose “socialized medicine”, they can still be won over by a nice grandmother who actually attends church and works diligently to help children and the handicapped. As long as she doesn’t tip her hand too much, she can win and finally have free reign to advance universal, single-payer health care without fear of being denied her next objective. Once one actually becomes President of the United States of America, what else is there?
I have a lot more confidence that Hillary will finally get us health care for all than I ever did about Barack Obama’s getting it for us. It wasn’t in his nature, but it is in hers. She’s itching to finally get back at the anti-health-care lobby who so cruelly rebuffed her initiative in 1993. Twenty-four years is a long time to wait for revenge, so don’t be surprised if she goes full-tilt on the progressive agenda as soon as she takes office. Don’t be surprised if she recalls Max Baucus as ambassador to China and sends him packing back to Montana. I’ll bet she hates that bastard as much as I do.
So, yes, Hillary will do her best to fulfill all the progressive planks in the Democratic Party platform. It’s where her heart has lain all along. She is finally free to do good and improve our lives. It’s hard to refute her intentions in that respect, despite all the desperately absurd caterwauling of Republican stooges casting her as a villainous evildoer.
One example of how President Clinton’s progressive self will soon be revealed bears special mention. No one should be surprised when she champions an overturning of the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. Sure, it’s mainly about getting money out of politics and preventing the buying of political influence. The original case, though, was about a horrid hit piece in the 2008 primary campaign financed by big-money Republican miscreants intent on delivering a knockout blow to Hillary and clearing the way for Barack Obama, an “inexperienced Negro” whom they thought would easily be defeated by any Republican, especially one like war hero John McCain.
Well, as we know, that last part of their insidious plan didn’t work out, but they did succeed in damaging Hillary and securing the right to as much political influence as they could buy. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg excoriated the Citizens United decision, and rightly so. That ruling is an abomination and it has to go. Secretary Clinton hasn’t forgotten the gutting of the FEC’s regulatory power to suppress that cruel attack on her. She will deal a death blow to it when she signs a bill passed by Congress into law as President. More than likely she will smile broadly and think to herself, “It’s payback time, bitches!”