The most important moment of last night’s debate came at the very end.
HOLT: Secretary Clinton?
CLINTON: Well Lester, I spent a lot of time last week being outraged by what's happening in Flint, Michigan, and I think every single American should be outraged. We've had a city in the United States of America where the population which is poor in many ways and majority African American has been drinking and bathing in lead contaminated water. And the governor of that state acted as though he didn't really care.
He had requesst for help and he had basically stone walled. I'll tell you what, if the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and being bathed in it, there would've been action.
So I sent my top campaign aide down there to talk to the mayor of Flint to see what I could to help. I issued a statement about what we needed to do and then I went on a T.V. show and I said, "it was outrageous that the governor hadn't acted and within two hours he had."
HOLT: And that's time.
CLINTON: I want to be a president who takes care of the big problems and the problems that are affecting the people of our country everyday.
(APPLAUSE)
HOLT: Thank you.
Senator Sanders?
SANDERS: Well, Secretary Clinton was right and what I did which I think is also right, is demanded the resignation of governor. A man who acts that irresponsibly should not stay in power.
Charlie Pierce nails it.
It is an actual issue affecting actual people, an issue that nonetheless has tributaries bleeding into all the vague conceptual issues that only get talked about. The crumbling infrastructure. The deplorable lack of a coherent national plan to revitalize our cities. The hundreds of environmental crises that sit like little Hiroshimas in the poor places all over the country. Deregulation in its many guises. Class. And, of course, race, even though this cannot be About Race because nothing in America ever is About Race. Issues like this bubble up from the bottom until, suddenly, they explode, and all the political pros scramble to catch up. That's what's happened with the heroin crisis, which wasn't even an issue when this campaign began, but is now central to everyone's campaign, especially in New Hampshire, and which may be the issue that finally turns the country around on its idiotic "war" on drugs. The Flint water crisis can be one of those issues. It is the collapse of a local government that was positively engineered to fail, because the people who engineered it figured that its victims were people the country didn't care about anyway.
"We have a governor who is a business exec, so he said he was going to run government like a business," said Congresswoman Brenda Lawrence, who represents Detroit. "This is a glaring example of decisions made on dollars and cents and on a budget and had a devastating effect on the people, especially the children, because the lead has a negative impact on the development of your brain. It's developmental. It's educational. Those children are going to need help for the next 15 years ... You cannot run a government without looking after the well-being of the people. On paper, he made a great decision, but look at the lives he impacted."
There are Flint, Michigans, all over the country and all over the world. The building environmental justice movement is a reaction to the long history of polluters in this country deliberately targeting politically marginalized minority communities to dump their pollutants. Climate change will and already is disproportionately harming people of color. But no one has been talking about it. And now people are talking about it.
The entire modern conservative movement has been built on racism. It’s no accident; it is, in fact, a a design feature. The Republican establishment is freaking out that Donald Trump’s openly racist comments continually just make him more popular with the Republican base, but they built that. But Democrats also too often have ignored or played on racial tensions. African Americans are the most loyal Democratic voters—African Americans are the base of the Democratic Party—yet elected Democrats too often have ignored or played on racial tensions. Times are changing. Finally, times are changing.
At a time when the economy was still staggering, Europe was embracing disastrous austerity, and political Washington was talking mostly about deficits, the Occupy Wall Street movement rose from the grass roots and changed the conversation. In the past year, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has done the same. From racist police violence to environmental justice, #BlackLivesMatter has forced the nation’s political leaders to begin looking at and talking about structural and institutional racism. The conversation is now embedded in how the political world talks about politics.
Pierce:
This was very much a debate over the value of government oversight and regulation—from the complicated financial instruments that nearly blew up the world economy to something as simple as tap water. Four years ago, nobody thought police violence would be a national issue. Six months ago, nobody thought the lead in Flint's water would be a national issue. Everybody, as is usually the case with these things, is wrong again.
The conversation has begun. Action must follow. And #BlackLivesMatter has been leading it all.