Bill Clinton is right when he says about people like me
"the caucuses aren't good for her. They disproportionately favor upper-income voters who, who, don't really need a president but feel like they need a change."
He is right about voters like me in a way I hadn't fully realized about myself. We have health care, we have housing, food, our kids are not fighting in Iraq, we live in safe neighborhoods--even in this oncoming recession we are doing fine. We don't need a President to make things better for us. Bill is also right that we "feel like" we need a change. What is it that we "feel" like we need to change? Continue over the fold.
What voters like me "feel" we need is a change in the values that currently rule the roost in Washington and more broadly across the country. The values that emphasize one's identity (gender, race, religion) as the characteristics that are most important in determining one's success or failure. Those same values extend into a foreign policy that puts serving (principally) wealthy American interests above everything else. A foreign policy that in an almost offhanded way invades other countries under false pretenses at a cost of millions of lives in those countries, a cost of tens of thousands of deaths and casualties among our own troops, and a cost of upwards of $3 trillion dollars to our economy. A trade policy designed principally to allow the very wealthy to squeeze an ever more out of the middle and poor. An economic policy that stands by while subprime lenders squeeze the last resources out of the elderly and poor. A health policy that panders to insurers and big pharma creating a massively inefficient system that doesn't cover more than 45 million Americans. An environmental policy that cares more about subsidizing farmers than about addressing global climate change. I could go on. So could you.
Bill is right, people like me don't need a President because simply electing a President isn't going to fix these problems without fundamentally changing America. We are not going to change America by electing a black President or a woman President. We are going to change America by organizing the white hot rage felt by Americans across income, race, gender and religion with respect to the disaster that our country has become under the watch of Bushs and Clintons. We are going to do it by turning upside down the political machines special interests have created with their political puppets--both Democratic and Republican--and creating new organizations that our elected politicians will necessarily be responsible too. We are going to do it by electing politicians that speak to what is best in all of us independent even of our partisan identities. We are going to do it by electing leaders who will help create and channel our energy in productive ways, not by co-opting these movements to build personal political fiefdoms.
Yes, Bill is right about what people like me need. What we don't need is the kind of "leadership" the Bushs and Clintons have provided these last 20 years. A leadership that isolates and incapacitates, that dismisses some of us as irrelevant, that not only fails to create the change we need but actively hinders it. We don't need that. People like me don't need the Clintons or Bushes. For their sake they better not need us either.
