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She is a very admirable person in many ways. Tough-minded, focused, knowledgeable, and smart. She has the talent and training to do a very good job as president, and I hope she will.

Having Obama as president has been a huge source of satisfaction to me. He has done an immense amount of good, and has provoked his opponents into showing exactly how wicked, stupid, and retrograde they are. I have hopes that Hillary’s presidency will do even more good, and show up even more evil.

Thank you Eszter (if I may). The fact that it’s entirely possible that this election may be competitive is depressing enough and, if it turns out that way, then it will be an indictment of the US electorate along several different dimensions.

Bloix and oldster: hear hear!

1. Tom Perez (Labor Sec)
2. Chris Murphy (Sen CT)
[Warren and Sharod Brown are more valuable in Senate and would be replaced by R Gov]

Klein isn’t specific enough. Clinton is a master of intra party politics. How that translates is to be determined.

BLUF*: My preference would be O’Malley or Patrick, conceivably Klobuchar or Franken.

My reasoning:
1. Strong preference for a (former) Governor or (former) Senator. The VP needs to be able to step in if something happens to the President. With that in mind, I want someone who has had relatively high level government experience and – preferably – foreign policy experience.
2. Patrick and O’Malley both seem like liberal-leaning competent technocratic managers. The VP doesn’t need to be inspiring. They need to be capable. Both of them fit the bill. Patrick was a pretty decent manager as MA Gov. My understanding though is that he doesn’t want to get back into politics. How’d O’Malley do when he was mayor of Baltimore?
3. I have a vaguely positive impression of Klobuchar but I’d need to learn a bit more about her and about MN politics before preferring she or Franken to Patrick or O’Malley.
4. I like Sherrod Brown a lot but gocart mozart (@7) nails the downside of selecting Brown. Brown is up for re-election this year too, yes?
5. Sanders and Warren are much greater assets in the Senate than they would be as VP. No. (See also gocart mozart’s point re Warren.)
6. Bloomberg, Cuomo, McAuliffe, Byah, Warner: May as well just flip me and other Sanders supporters the bird. (I don’t know too much about Kaine but I suspect that upon investigation he’d fall into that camp as well.)
7. Shaheen: Meh. Vice presidential but I don’t see her as up to the task being President.
8. Vilsack and Napolitano: Not as familiar with them as Shaheen but similar impression.
9. Biden: Current VP and former Senator. I’d be good with him. Would he do it again?
10. Becerra and Foxx: I know nothing about them but they don’t pass my Gov/Sen litmus test.
11. Castro, Castro, Salazar: Don’t know them beyond knowing their names and what positions they hold. Don’t pass the Gov/Sen test.
12. Booker: Corporate shill. No thanks.
13. De Blasio: Seems like a nice guy and well-intentioned but not presidential material.
14. Harris: Premature. Get her elected to the Senate and maybe in 2024.

*BLUF = Bottom Line Up Front

Everyone’s so well behaved! (Tho maybe a couple of comments got deleted?) Anyway, I thought the smart money was on Warren at this point.

Julian Castro

If she picks Julian Castro, Trump will flood Florida with advertising that says “Hillary is a communist! Castro is her running mate!” And that will be enough to give Trump Florida’s 29 electoral votes.

As someone who has always appreciated EH’s post, I ask these questions genuinely, not to start an unproductive flamewar, based on the tweets she quotes approvingly.

Is Hillary Clinton’s “entire political career”, something to celebrate? It seems very difficult to brush off the support for Iraq and the devastating effects of welfare reform on the lives of millions. Outside of the conservative bubble, it seems uncontroversial to say that these were massive sources of unnecessary human suffering. If that’s the price the political system asks for a symbolic victory then shouldn’t we be trying to upend the system? And if not should we consider the election of Margaret Thatcher a minor victory (maybe we should)?

Aside from her gender, Hillary has been a status quo politician. What are the gains that can be envisioned from the symbolism of having a woman atop the status quo? To my eyes it seems unlikely that those further down the kyriarchy will see many tangible benefits from an HRC victory but maybe I’m missing something.

@js (06.09.16 1:28 am):

I don’t think Warren is it. She and Clinton don’t see eye to eye and whoever replaces her in the Senate would be a downgrade.

Gov. Charlie Baker is a Republican and would almost certainly appoint a Republican to fill her seat until the special election to replace her. As far as a permanent replacement goes, former Gov. Deval Patrick and current Congressman Mike Capuano would be good – not as good as Warren but good – but Patrick has indicated that he’s not particularly interested in getting back into politics and Capuano got his head handed to him by Martha Coakley (who subsequently lost to Scott Brown who lost his re-election bid to Warren) when he ran to be the Democratic nominee to replace Kennedy. Not sure Capuano will run again or how he’d fare if he did. The short list of likely Democratic nominees to replace Warren is probably Seti Warren, Deb Goldberg, Seth Moulton, Niki Tsongas, and Stephen Lynch. (Maybe I missed someone and maybe I’m too generous to include Warren and Goldberg.) Not particularly strong or popular candidates. If Baker decided to run for the seat he’d have a pretty good shot at winning.

That and Warren is a great asset in the Senate. Making her VP would undermine her authority. Clinton would not be doing Democrats or non-Democrat progressives any favors by selecting Warren.

I only meant to gesture at the fact that some fairly astute political commentators, on Twittet e.g., seem to think it’ll be Warren. Obviously, they could be wrong. Equally obviously, even if they’re right, it could be a bad choice in one way or another.

Sounds as if the OP should be read as implicitly banning any commenting on its actual contents (unless agreeing) and only endorsing discussion of VPs. Since the contents are fairly controversial and consciously so, this seems quite … impressive. Indeed, it’s beyond me how anyone could find it appropriate to post comments on such terms, even if they agree with the OP and are sincerely interested in the issue of VPs.

“Sounds as if the OP should be read as implicitly banning any commenting on its actual contents (unless agreeing)”

Just part of the general “ha ha you suck Bernie Bros” that’s going on right now. HRC is nearly guaranteed to win against Trump and there’s no point in even pretending that the Democratic Party needs people to the left.

But, yeah democracy!

I’d bet HRC won’t pick a woman to run w her for roughly the same reason Obama did not pick an African-American to run w him: for pragmatic reasons, she wants the electorate to take the historic first in its stride, so to speak, and not underline or re-emphasize the historic novelty via the whole ticket. Perhaps too calculating, and thus I might be wrong, but’s that how I’d bet. Not the ideal way to pick a v.p. perhaps but I think one shd recognize these things are probably considered.

@25

a. One could take issue with the OP and argue that nomination of the first woman by a major party for President is not an important historic moment. Or only identity politics makes it so, and identity politics is the politics of slavery by another name, as Jeffery Lord would say.

b. Or one could argue against the OP that the gendered nature of elections is not stacked against women. Or at least not significantly so. Or that Sanders faced an even more stacked deck.

c. one could argue that a significant number of people did indeed vote for her only because she is a woman

d. one could argue that voting for Clinton would be harmful since that will only make her inevitable win a mandate which (her having a mandate) will make possible some very terrible things.

e. one could take issue with the Ezra Klein piece

f. one could try to explain why Sanders lost so badly in NJ and California where he has been camped out for the last two weeks–I was not expecting that.

But I don’t think one should complain about being implicitly banned by the Clinton supporters.

dd @ 10

constitutionally, that would require an admission that they’ve separated, plus Bill is not eligible to serve as POTUS

In 2000, Cheney pretended he was not living in Texas, and — professional courtesy and always ready to be bf’d, the Dems did not object, but . . .

The key to H’s choice is to avoid kindling any eagerness to replace her. Obama chose someone who had already established to every one’s satisfaction except Biden’s own that there was absolutely no desire in the country to see Biden as P. Is there such a person now? Martin O’Malley seemed presentable, but curiously unpopular.

“there has been no implicit ban of debate”

No one has bothered to actually debate, because that’s not the point of this post. If there was going to be debate, it would have to start with obvious things like the only argument that HRC has presented to the left to vote for her over Trump is that Trump is horrible, and that the only argument that HRC presented to the left to vote for her over Sanders was that you were sexist if you didn’t. (And David Brock in his way did a bit of “you’re racist if you don’t vote for HRC” too.) And of course RNB followed along with that here.

And this post follows in that line. There’s nothing in particular in it about HRC, other than that she’s a woman who has succeeded within the system. Thatcher was a woman. And of course Palin was a woman too, but on the wrong side of the tribal divide, so the bombs that Palin would have dropped would have killed people for the wrong reasons, unlike the bombs that HRC will have dropped that will kill people for the right reasons.

I’ll be sure to bookmark this post and quote it later after the first bombings. Then we can all get mad all over again about those men who stole credit for those emojis.

But I don’t think one should complain about being implicitly banned by the Clinton supporters.

Last try and then I’ll give up for good. I posted four lines of anti-Clinton emojis in response to the pro-Clinton emojis and they appeared then vanished. I posted a comment noting the removal of the first without referencing its contents and that has also disappeared. And I am now seemingly in the Kafkaesque position of reading people discuss the fact that there has been no prevention of disagreement whilst being prevented from disagreeing with them. The emojis were not rude in any way and referenced Clinton’s imperialism, as a rejoinder to the reference to her gender in the emojis in the OP, and the second comment was only mildly sarcastic. I’m happy not to comment further but if I have been banned I am completely in the dark as to why.

RNB,

I’m not at all convinced that Palin and Clinton wouldn’t bomb most of the same people for most of the same reasons.

I don’t know whether Ed Rendell is actually a Clinton “surrogate,” but apparently Warren lacks enough “experience in foreign policy,” to be president. (Sounds to me suspiciously like “She’s a girl.” YMMV.)

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/282815-clinton-surrogate-warren-not-in-any-way-shape-or-form

I doubt very much if Clinton picks another woman, and I’d be mildly surprised if she picks a POC who codes as such. I read her as cautious to a fault, and I expect her campaign to accumulate money and let Trump scare the hell out of everybody. (That’s what scares me. It’ll probably work, but if you’re content to win 17-10, sometimes weird things happen. And Trump is weird.)

My feeling is that if she picks Warren, the benefit to Clinton is that it’ll shut Warren up about the Wall Street money that’s about to come rolling in.

I honestly don’t see what’s in it for Warren. If she wants to run for President, she’s better off in the Senate, and if she wants to be effective, the same is true.

I think we can all agree that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is out, right?

From the beginning of this very long debate about the Democratic nomination process, I always thought that the differences between Clinton and Sanders were not that great and the differences in what they could accomplish were not that great. I thought from the outset that the real issue was electability.

I had less nervousness about a candidate whom I thought had a very good chance of turning out a historic women’s vote and turning out the Latino vote and the Black vote than a candidate who depended on getting a a good majority of the independent vote and turning out the young in historic fashion. I was very nervous about relying on a historic youth turnout. So I supported Clinton. I thought Sanders could lose the enthusiasm of the Latinos due to his immigration votes if he ever were hit really hard about this and that he would have a hard time defending himself against the tax-and-spend charge, to say nothing of his associations with socialist governments, in the media blitz before the election.

The one debate he got hit hard with questions was the one in the Florida, and after what I thought was a real test in the debate he lost badly in Ohio and Florida as well as (?) Illinois and Missouri, I think. I worried about his ability to take a real punch. And not doing well in Ohio and Florida really made me worry; those are two very important swing states. For all these reasons I did not take Sanders’ advantage in head-to-head polls with Trump seriously, and thought it could evaporate upon attack.

It was my belief that Clinton’s rating wasn’t getting any lower, and she already could beat Trump.
Sanders spent a lot of time and money in New York and California and lost badly.

I do not think he was as strong an electoral candidate as his supporters thought. Interestingly he never released five years of his full tax filings. This could have been to hide a big severance package his wife received as she was running Burlington College into the ground. This could be a small matter compared to the charge of corruption via the Clinton Foundation and the email issue, but he depended on having a squeaky-clean image to get votes.

Trump was more of a threat when I made my decision whom to support. I went with the person whom I thought was the safer candidate to defeat him and have taken my fair share of blows for this stance on this list.

This does indicate what an existential threat I took Trump to be from the outset. I am happy to see him finally imploding, but I am still cautious.

Elsewhere I reveled in the notion of Warren as VP, even though it’s a less powerful position than Senator or Secretary, just because it would make her the presumptive successor, but she may be too old for that.

How about John Kerry? No one else has suggested him. He’s presidential material, or at least we used to think so, and he’ll have more experience and gravitas than any conceivable Republican opponent. He needs a job, and the minimal duties of the Vice President would probably be preferable to either retirement or private employment.

clinton/sanders yo, obvs.

3 SCOTUS appointments likely in the next few years

There’s no way Alito and Thomas are retiring if a Dem is in the White House. And if they die, the Repubs will prop up their corpses, Weekend at Bernie’s style. With Thomas, no one will be able to tell the difference.

Apparently the 2008 primary decided the next 16 years and that’s final

Posts like this have the faint whiff of Germans 1945-75 who never accepted the Oder-Neisse line.

Damn it, both parties should just embrace court packing so we quit whining about SCOTUS and also the exponentially increasing number of justices would be a great jobs program.

@ 41RNB – I suspect that where we differ is in our faith in the ability of the current system and actors within it to address problems.

As you say :”She’s an ordinary deal-making, compromising Democratic politician but still galaxies far away from what the Republicans are offering.” On the assumption that the major issues of the day were capable of being solved within the framework of a Democrat making pragmatic deals to get things done then Hillary Clinton is a fine candidate. This is the argument you make for HRC on both Iraq and Welfare – she did the best she could within the systemic constraints. Kevin Drum makes the most persuasive form of this argument and I’m somewhat partial to it.

However there seems more evidence that the model of democracies where the pragmatic politicians of the centre-left make deals with the centre-right and we all muddle through is failing. Not just in the US but in virtually all advanced democracies, hard left and hard right wing parties are on the rise due to dissatisfaction with the *system* – in the US the mainstream of the two parties. Relating to this I’d encourage you to read Henry Farrell’s essay in Aeon a few years ago [1]. It seems to me highly unlikely that a status quo politician negotiating with Republicans in the manner that has occurred over the last 30 years will be able to take the actions necessary to make the dramatic changes to the political system as a whole that are needed.

So to return to the initial points HRC maybe made a pragmatic decision *within* the system, however the system is so dysfunctional and immiserating at this stage that its preservation is likely to at best kick the can down the road and the current dysfunction and polarization will remain.

Perhaps you can make the argument that she’ll change the system from within but I really can’t imagine her using the political institutions as they currently exist to force through a dramatic redistribution of wealth, decarbonise the economy or stand up to an over-interventionist defense/foreign policy establishment (which she seems thoroughly part of).

[1] https://aeon.co/essays/the-left-is-now-too-weak-for-democracy-to-survive

OK I’ll read the Farrell essay which does look very interesting and Part III of Poulantzas’s State, Power and Socialism too…

I am going to use this comment to daydream about VP candidates who are incredibly unlikely.

Lawrence Lessig
Vanita Gupta
Tim Wu
Neal Katyal

There is a certain precedent for having two people of the same gender on the presidential ticket.

Hillary is going to paint Trump as the past, and position her campaign as the future. Choosing a running mate in her 40s or 50s would reinforce that image, and continue the work of building the Democratic Party. Demographically, I would say that her ideal VP pick is a woman of color somewhere between her late 40s to mid-50s.

Female Democrats are governors in New Hampshire, Oregon, and Rhode Island. NH and RI are too small, and too northeastern. Oregon would mean someone from the West, but she moved up to the governorship when the previous governor resigned in scandal; I think not.

Senators: Mikulski (MD), Feinstein (CA), Boxer (CA), Murray (WA), probably too old for the job. Cantwell (WA) western!, Stabenow (MI), Klobuchar (MN) as mentioned above, McCaskill (MO) probably too conservative, Shaheen (NH) again with the Northeast, Gillibrand (NY) same state as Clinton, Hirono (HI), Warren (MA) as discussed above, Heitkamp (ND) probably too conservative, Baldwin (WI). All of the Senators and governors are white, except Hirono.

There are 84 women currently serving in the US House of Representatives; 62 of them are Democrats. The congresswomen include 32 women of color: 18 African-American women, 5 Asian/Pacific Islanders, and 9 Latinas. I haven’t looked through their ranks comprehensively, so there might be some surprises. Alma Adams looked interesting: African-American, NC is a swing state, great name – Clinton/Adams would be like a throwback to the Constitutional Convention. But she’s 70. Donna Edwards just lost a tough Senate primary, but seems to have significant progressive support. Michelle Lujan Grisham looks very interesting: NM, so both western and a swing state, Hispanic, mid-50s.

What about mayors? I looked for women among mayors of the 100 largest US cities and came up with some rough and ready observations. The biggest obstacle for most of them is that they have not been in office very long.

Ivy Taylor, Mayor of San Antonio, one of the 10 largest cities in the US. Black, age 46, second woman to be elected Mayor of San Antonio, first African-American elected to the position. Officially non-partisan, only in office since 2014.
Jennifer W. Roberts, Mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina. Major city in a potential swing state. Career includes time as a US diplomat. Only in office since 2015.
Megan Barry, Mayor of Nashville. First woman to hold the post. MBA, professional work in healthcare and ethics. Only in office since 2015.
Betsy Hodges, Mayor of Minneapolis. Only in office since 2014.
Nelda Martinez, Mayor of Corpus Christi, Texas. Hispanic. Only in office since 2012.
Nancy Vaughan, Mayor of Greensboro, North Carolina. Potential swing state. Only in office since 2013.
Hillary Schieve, Mayor of Reno, Nevada. Swing state, age 46. Officially non-partisan but endorsed by Nevada Democratic Party, only in office since 2014.

“This isn’t to minimize Clinton’s accomplishment–in fact it makes it more impressive that she’s managed dominate a still mostly male party establishment. But we shouldn’t be so quick to assume that Clinton’s strengths–and weaknesses–are widely shared among women. In particular, we shouldn’t assume too quickly that party processes favoring “a campaign of relationships, not speeches”, as Klein put it, would be good for female politicians generally.”

She really is gifted at intra party politics, but there was another Clinton who you seem to be forgetting in that narrative.

Her (and Bill’s) political brilliance was keeping Warren, Brown, and Biden out of the race. She would have lost to all three just like she lost to Obama. She is so disliked it took her to June to beat Bernie who had little name recognition before the primaries.

HRC is constrained to pick someone for VP with very strong foreign policy knowledge, who will also memorize all of Trump’s contradictory nonsense on every other issue too, and keep repeating it endlessly before audiences. All of the Democrats had better start, this very moment.

Comment-disappearing is a pretty bad idea, because it doesn’t fix structural problems wrt disagreement about acceptable standards of discourse. Just patches over the problem.

[you need negative feedback to tell you where the boundaries are, which means the negative feedback needs to be visible. Better still if you can see the negative feedback engendered by the actions of others, because then everyone’s learning from the mistakes that everyone makes rather than just their own. Disappearing comments… I barely remember what I did post, can’t be expected to notice it if it’s gone: this means that disappearing my posts leaves me with no sign I’ve done wrong. If I can’t learn from my mistakes, and if I can’t learn from others’ mistakes… then I can’t from any mistakes, and so can’t learn to avoid any mistakes. Not good.]

If you want to get rid of undesired content, disemvowel or delete stuff, but leave some token of “this was a bad choice X made”.

Oh, look. Upper class twit women trying to convince each other that they are history’s greatest victims, instead of history’s most protected class of people.

It is censorship. Censorship is any removal of other people’s abilities to speak. That’s the definition of censorship.

You can pretend that it’s justified here, but you don’t have the right to change the definitions of words. It’s censorship, and this is why people have always rejected feminism, and why they increasingly reject the left.

This is what has made academia a joke — the notion that only other people (people who disagree with academic leftists) should have their preconceived notions challenged. This is why Trump is pulling even, because people are sick of the doublethink. They are sick of liberals making rules only other people have to follow.

I think the time for feminists to get excited might be if the Democratic Party adopts a presidential candidate who is both female and not a former First Lady with impeccable establishment connections.

P.S. I just saw #66 after posting. I thought about the pros and cons of that myself, and decided I have no problem with comments being deleted without comment. That way the one who made the comment gets the negative reinforcement without the further embarrassment of being identified. If in doubt, they can resubmit the comment until doubt is removed.

Rich P: “But this celebration of the primary win because HRC is a woman is also a celebration of all the people who will predictably be killed by HRC…”

I confess I don’t grasp the point of this objection. If history is any guide, any person elected to the Presidency will predictably kill people; it seems to go with the territory. Go ahead, name the last President who killed no people.

Is it only HRC who is not to be celebrated? Or are no winners of primary contests ever to be celebrated? Even if the latter, why make the objection now, with respect to HRC?

I only read Danielle Allen’s rather good piece on Clinton recently: Hilary is the ultimate establishment candidate:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sorry-hillary-you-are-the-establishment/2016/02/05/0aa7cf80-cc27-11e5-a7b2-5a2f824b02c9_story.html

Harry: “I suppose Beyonce is off the table for VP? She’s smart, popular, articulate, hard to dislike. ”

Well, there’s her Drunk in Love song with its lyric “Eat the cake, Anna Mae”, which seems to condone the violence Ike Turner did to Tina.

The Democratic Party being what it is, I think we can venture a small bet that, with HRC at the top of the ticket, the VP pick will be:

1. Male
2. Straight
3. Cis
4. “Centrist”
5. Not Senator Sanders

I would put another, slightly smaller, bet on him being white, although I accept that a Hispanic or Asian candidate is not quite inconceivable.

@56

What appeals to you about Lessig? He strikes me as a good-hearted guy who is nonetheless extraordinarily politically naive. It feels silly to worry about competence when Trump is a possibility but I’d be pretty concerned in his case given the way he has spent his energies in the last few years.

I would love to see Tim Wu get a role in shaping tech policy at the national level, but not sure VP is the best place from which to from which to do it. He could definitely have a future in electoral politics in NY.

I’m not too familiar with Katyal and Gupta but they appear to be people who would have a bright future in a Clinton Administration, though again, I’m not clear why VP would be a good place.

I’d be interested to hear more about what you admire about the four people you named.

As for the VP, I’ll go with Al Franken. I’ve seen him in gov’t forums on several occasions and he is extremely smart, from the left, a team player, and can bring down a room with a pause. Completely composed from years of practice, he would not be left-footed by Trump. He is after all a professional comedian. My guess is she pivots right but whatever choice she makes, it’s about winning.

I recall a similar sentiment about Franken in the first comment to this thread that is no longer here. (Bliox?) It was short and noncontroversial. I could be wrong.

@81 — And that’s part of the reason she is so disliked. She’s buddies w/Tony Podesta fcs. There isn’t a long enough shower to wash that off. We’re in a lesser of two evils world. A lot of people will have a lingering taste of vomit in their mouths when leaving the voting booth.

My impression is that for the most part, criticisms of Hillary that I’ve seen are fair and similar to what an otherwise similar male candidate would get. Obviously there are exceptions, the raising her voice stuff is an example.

Of course there is a certain built-in unfairness, eg if Clinton’s hair was as unkempt as Trump or Sanders she would probably lose a lot more votes for it than they do. But on the other hand, there are people making fun of Trump’s hair, his skin tone, his small hands, the way he pronounces certain words etc, so not all of that trivial stuff is due to gender bias necessarily.

As a native Minnesotan who unfortunately landed 35 years ago in Wisconsin, I must caution those who look favorably on Klobuchar or Franken as VP. First Minnesota probably wouldn’t elect another Democrat to the Senate, the state DFL Party is a neoliberal mess. Second, Amy Klobuchar is a very nice person and I’m sure she is nice to her children and doesn’t abuse the dog but she has the political substance of an egg souflee and the energy and imagination of an anesthetized rock. And Franken was beaten into submission by the party bosses both state and national and only won re-election by playing invisible man for 6 years per the instructions of the party bosses. As for Elizabeth Warren not only can we not afford to lose her in the Senate but she is far to intelligent and might I say intellectually honest to get anywhere near Mrs. Clinton politically or otherwise.

Christ, the disappeared comments by Phil and Engels must have been awful if they were so much worse than soullite’s usual crescendo of righeous drivel, which remains in all its glory.

Yeah, some point Frankin took a beating from the Three Letter Agencies or their protectors because he toned down his criticism on surveillance and civil liberties violations about 85%. Not sure that’s a good starting point for the person a heartbeat away.

“Or that recent scene when he’s standing over a bunch of people eating in a booth at a restaurant arguing with one of them.”
It looked to me that the New School student in that booth was having the time of his life, sensing that he would soon reach rock star status for having a vigorous debate with Bill Clinton.

That Klein piece is ridiculous. I never knew LBJ had such success because of his feminine virtues.

Garrulous #94: “The aggressive moderation policy on this thread is ill-conceived, insulting and unnecessary. I can only imagine it will do some damage to conversation on this site.”

I strongly disagree. Quashing some knuckleheadedness could only improve things.

JeffreyG: “On the point of counting chickens, do not be too hasty. The so-called ‘FBI primary’ is still going strong, and many of HRC’s prior statements (reassurances) on that situation have been proven false by official reports.”

This would be something to take seriously if you actually articulated a charge, or could do so. I have no doubt at all that HRC chose her particular email strategy with the intention that she, not someone else, be in control of the keeping of records of her communication, for obvious political reasons. Even knowing that, and disapproving of it, does not lead me to any obvious crime. It was certainly known to anyone of prominence in the hierarchy of the state department and the executive branch that she was doing so – one need only send to or receive from her any email to know. No one told her she couldn’t, no one stopped her, no one took steps to retain her data. So, what’s the crime, exactly?

RE: Consumatopia’s comment: I too, am not a big fan of Bill Clinton. I’m not a fan of HRC, either, but if I had to choose between her and him she’d win every time. I doubt there are many CT readers who despise HRC more than they despise her husband, but I know there are plenty of people who do, and the only reasonable explanation of that is some form of sexism. Thatcher, too, was subject to extreme sexism, throughout her rise in the Tory party, her leadership and premiership, and afterwards. The people who treated her in (revoltingly) sexist ways were, by and large, people I’d sooner have seen in power: she did terrible things, and many of those men would not have done such bad things, and without her any one of them would have been PM because her wing of the Tory party had no other standard bearer who could plausibly have been leader, or won an election if they were. But that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that she overcame much greater barriers, and dealt with more ongoing bullshit, than any similarly capable man would have had to. (I’m not disagreeing with anything Consumatopia said, just free associating or something….)

Finally — about the OP. I pored over that visual for a very long time, several times, and only figured out what it meant after reading some comment above. So. I feel pretty stupid.

Layman,
I don’t want to derail the thread with this – when talking about these sort of investigations the discussion quickly turns to speculation of the sort that I don’t think anyone would benefit from. So don’t expect me to get into this one in too much detail after this.

That being said, you are right that the consequences need to be spelled out. To be brief, there are a number of potential harms here: violation of an NDA that she signed upon entering office; violations of protocols for handling sensitive data; gross negligence with respect to her cyber-security set-up; inadvertently revealing the names/details of US spies, risking their missions; giving an open door to the cyber-espionage of rival nations; use of a private server to circumvent the FOIA process, in the extreme charge as a way of using the Clinton Foundation as a sort of pay-to-play operation in conjunction with the State Dept; a formal indictment of HRC.

To be clear – I am just spelling out the possible scenarios for set-back*. Not all of these are significantly damaging enough to derail her presidential bid. But some of them – alone or in concert with other issues – might be sufficient via more institutional channels or at the ballot box, and that worries me. Also worrisome is how HRC and her surrogates have insisted throughout the primary process that this was not going to be a problem, and would go away soon, despite much evidence to the contrary (here we are). Sure, it might all be a ‘nothingburger’ in the end; but there is a chance that this one is live, and set to blow up in our collective faces if this is the path chosen.

*It should be noted, of course, that there is also the possibility that she passes through these investigations without major incident, which may be effectively spun into a sort of 3rd party vetting to her political advantage.

“I and at least one other CT author have deleted comments from this thread. This is nothing new”

It is nothing new: Maria deleted the whole end of a comment thread when it got too anti-war for her tastes so that it could end with a pro-military comment that she approved of. During the Lybia intervention the comment threads here were managed in order to not upset a guest “humanitarian” in charge of making justifications for that killing at the U.N.

But, as Lynne writes above, “it is necessary.”

About the meme of Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street: you not only need to assemble a coalition to win a election; you have to keep a coalition together in order to govern. Clinton, like any other Democratic president who wants to be effective, will have to garner support from the business classes and all the more so because many of her stated policy goals make bankers and billionaires very nervous. Clinton will continue to make nice with Goldman Sachs et.al., but not because she got hefty speaking fees.

#111 – I got it straight away, but only because my daughter (revising for her History exam) had been complaining about how difficult it was to keep inter-war presidents straight: “they’re all old white guys!”

#114 – a shorter and slightly more tetchy version of comment #84, for one. (Yes, I’m upset about it – I’ve been commenting on CT for years now & never got so much as a warning before.)

I delete comments from threads, rarely without warning, but sometimes, especially early on in a thread, if I think the comment has a high probability of derailing the discussion. To a considerable extent this is a forum that I use to get valued input from commentators, and if I think a comment is going to prevent that from happening (and it often has) I act selfishly. I don’t think I have done this to an innocuous comment, but I would, if I thought it was worth it (and would, in that case, send an email explaining). Actually, now I realise I have done that once, but the email address was a fake one.

Anyway whenever I do that I am pretty confident that I am improving things for the many more people who read my threads than comment on them, and for most of the commenters. Readers have at least as much of an interest in getting something of value as potential commenters have in venting their feelings.

I’ve had comments devoweled or whatever the word is and deleted by John Quiggin and Chris Bertram. Corey Robin has threatened to expunge me from his threads several times. I could not post to a while for CT and wrote people who I thought might have banned whether they had. Only one did not write back to say that he had not banned me. At any rate, I was able to post again a few days later. Are we supposed to be crying about this? I mean if you are a rrrrrevolutionary or a Clinton apologist like me you have chosen a difficult life for yourself and should expect one beset by brutal blows, smears, blackballing, petty insults, shaming, ridicule and silencing. But we Clinton shills will soldier on.

“But we Clinton shills will soldier on.”

Eh, I think I’ve seen you mention this at least 4 times in the past few months. If this is you suffering in silence….. ; )

RNB, I admire your fortitude. ;)

“I never thought that any of the contributors would play in loco parentis and remove comments without notice or explanation.”
Really you never noticed others whose politics you may not share complain about a post having been expunged/”disappeared” or being threatened to be cut off or seeing the vowels of their posts being taken out. Or is it that this is the first time it has happening to those with whom you agree and that is why this common CT practice is finally registering.
Please spare us the sanctimony.

We’ve had non-stop Clinton criticism here and a few of us have posted a lot in favor of Clinton over Sanders as a potential nominee. It’s all getting out there.

There was a request in the OP to focus on the historic significance of a woman finally being nominated by a major party for the US Presidency and how she was able to overcome patriarchal opposition. One answer is that he has really deep ties with establishment Democrats. Did Ezra Klein call this kind of networking a woman’s style of politics. I don’t find that convincing.

But like harry b was able to note that Thatcher whom he may well detest endured a lot of sexist insult we could focus on the egregiously sexist comments that have been made about HRC and see what this reveals about our culture (your daughters may see no harm in focusing on that) just as the fact that Trump has millions of supporters and even independents don’t find his talk about Curiel decisively racist says something sad about the level of prejudice in society.

Citizen RNB I confess that I’ve been called a lot of things especially by my kids but this is the first time I’ve been called sanctimonious. Coming from you I guess I’ll take it as a compliment.

@134 First time to your face, perhaps. Kids talk a lot behind our backs.

@95 Godot and @99Cranky

Thanks for the update on Franken. It’s hard to follow everyone and local knowledge in politics is valuable — one reason for coming to CT. Still trying to figure out why the Bliox comment was deleted other than banning him altogether. The thread asked for VP opinions and Franken seemed an obvious Warren-side choice — from a state w/a dem governor (unlike Warren and Brown) and more than capable of being the VP attack dog against Trump. He was even on the link in the OP. In fact, your characterization makes him even a more likely candidate as I don’t see HC going actual left in her choice. She wants someone who’s a team player which is expected. Any thoughts appreciated.

First. For VP I think Al Franken is a clear-cut best choice because:
1. He had the best understanding that that financial crisis would have been much less likely had the rating agencies been truly independent. He immediately sponsored legislation to give them more independence–that is more important than the debate that happened between Sanders and Clinton about size of banks. And a professional satirist is the most qualified to address what is happening with the Trump campaign.

Second. I will actively support Clinton against Trump but am really disappointed that she is the nominee–not because she is a woman but because she is a Clinton.
I know that a majority of what has been said about Bill and Hillary has been overblown and some outright false. However, I have some (admittedly second-hand) experience with their politics. In my Congressional district in 2012 there was an open seat as Chris Murphy decided to run for the senate. Three Democrats were in the primary. The former speaker of the CT House, a former representative in the state house, and the son of a top national lobbyist. The former speaker had a close associate indicted the first week of the primary campaign. So the choice was between the former state representative (a woman backed by Emily’s List and other feminist-leaning groups) and a young man with no experience who had lived most of his life outside the district.

http://ctmirror.org/2012/08/10/robertis-father-and-son-lobbyist-and-candidate/
http://www.oneidadispatch.com/article/OD/20120807/NEWS/308079957

Bill Clinton endorsed the young man.
This is really annoying because the district was one of the few really competitive districts and would most likely have been lost had Clinton’s candidate lost.

Some of the critiques of Sanders and his supporters were doubling annoying. Such as he wasn’t helping elect Democrats and his supporters were anti-women. While those may have been somewhat valid, my experience with the Clintons is that the country or values can take a backseat to who can help them or do them favors.

Just noticed some graffiti from Georgia in 2007 (or so Wikipedia would have me believe):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikheil_Saakashvili#/media/File:Vote_Saakashvili.JPG

Replying to Doug at 58 – one problem with finding mayors that have been in office long enough is that you’re only looking at current mayors. Annise Parker just finished her third two-year term as mayor of Houston, and also has the distinction of being the first gay mayor of a city over a million in the United States. I don’t know if any other medium-to-large cities have recently had women mayors that didn’t show up in the search for current mayors. (San Antonio also had another woman as mayor before the current one, but she just lost a statewide race, which might be bad for optics, even though statewide offices in Texas just aren’t actually open to Democrats these days.)

@ Umm I thought I was obviously satirizing the idea of a Clinton “shill” or a Sanders “revolutionary” suffering great indignities here at CT.

On Sanders he is not as far to the left as you think: Serbian bombing, Iraq Regime Change Act, 100% support of Israel hitherto, Afghan invasion–have you checked his stances on the sanctions that were put on Iraq and Iran; or the aid package to Ukraine. You do know that he voted for the deregulation of derivatives and supports drone warfare. And why didn’t you support Jill Stein?

Second Sanders can’t do squat if he can’t win in a general election. Don’t his poor showings in California, New Jersey, Florida, Ohio create some, any concern?

Third Clinton is willing to subsidize college, make taxes more progressive, push for paid parental leave, strengthen Dodd-Frank, expand early childhood education, put a labor activist on the platform committee and make much better judicial appointments than any Republican would.

So when you come up with an argument for why I should not vote for Clinton to keep Trump out of office, wake me up, F. Foundling.

Peter K@108

I don’t think Krugman was particularly unfair to Bernie. He’s a columnist; he’s allowed to have opinions. It got a little personal because when he and other good economists pointed out that Gerald Friedman’s economic analysis of Bernie’s plan was way off, they brought down upon themselves a torrent of invective (The Gang of Four!) from people who said well, obviously you’re in the pocket of Clinton. As it turned out of course, the economists were right.

Krugman had some substantive doubts about Bernie, which included the behavior of some his acolytes. I had similar doubts, which have mostly been realized. Maybe I’m missing something, but what I’ve seen has been sketchy ideas and a reluctance to flesh them out. On any policy, it seemed that Bernie’s answer was that Clinton disagreed with him and (“because” implied but not stated) was getting contributions from X (banks, drug companies, fossil fuel industry, etc). I don’t recall any substantive discussion of policy differences.

So to get back to my question: I know that Krugman was not able to resist the temptation of making snide remarks, but how was he actually unfair to Bernie?

Jeffrey C @102 Sorry to lose you. In what way has Clinton shown contempt for you/your generation? After this campaign, my own opinion of you/your generation is pretty low, but what are your complaints about Clinton?

A general point: The designation of Clinton as a “neoliberal” instantly befogs any discussion. The word conflates two terms, (1) an American one, nearly dead, denoting people who, roughly, were open to using markets to achieve progressive ends; and (2) a British one, with a strong ideological emphasis on markets and generally conservative ends. George Monbiot was writing about the second; carbon taxes belong to the first (sorry, Bernie, you’re a neoliberal now). Thatcher, second; Clinton, first. Safest course: avoid the word, which has become term of abuse on the left (“Neolib bitch!”)

Oh, and I assume the mention of Lessig as VP candidate was intended as a way for Clinton to signal a commitment to campaign finance reform, which she should definitely do, but in some other way.

Howard Frant @148
The designation of Clinton as a “neoliberal” instantly befogs any discussion. The word conflates two terms, (1) an American one, nearly dead, denoting people who, roughly, were open to using markets to achieve progressive ends; and (2) a British one, with a strong ideological emphasis on markets and generally conservative ends.

There was a long discussion of this whole issue not too long ago at CT attached to a post by C. Robin. You (H. Frant) evidently learned little or nothing from that discussion. The ‘other’ meaning of ‘neoliberal’ is not specifically British but rather reflects how the word has been used generally outside the specific context of domestic U.S. politics. In that meaning the word refers, inter alia, to an emphasis on privatization, deregulation, ‘free’ trade agreements, imposition of fiscal discipline on poorer countries via the IMF, and often attacks on welfare or public goods provision, to name a few. Thatcherism is one instance, but far from exhausts it.

p.s. On the question of whether there are any similarities betw. Charles Peters-style (‘American’) neoliberalism and neoliberalism in the broader sense, there is no pt rehashing that whole discussion.

147

Your argument is idiotic: all presidents kill people, so who cares. There are if course presidents and policies that are more belligerent and consequently kill more people than others. It’s a matter of degree. And while I personally wouldn’t celebrate any US president, it is clear that Clinton is a particularly extreme example of a hawk and therefore shouldn’t be celebrated by those who claim to be liberals or left, if these designations should retain any meaning at all.

“Your argument is idiotic: all presidents kill people, so who cares”

That’s not my argument, but thanks for giving ‘reason’ a go. I’m not sure you’re doing it right…

p.s. The strikes in question occurred last year.

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/online-incivility-study-bernie-bro/

https://twitter.com/Olivianuzzi/status/740367983466414080

Feeling as if Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden were auditioning for the VP position today. Warren trashed The Donald (my proposed nickname for him is BFD: Big Fraud Don; Warren emphasized Trump’s fraudulent character), and Biden gave a more subtle explanation of how Trump has threatened Curiel and endangered the rule of law. He also wrote a letter to the Stanford rape victim. So I am lowering my odds that the VP choice will be Castro or Perez or Becerra.

@Shmoo 06.10.16 1:11 am

I share your take on Patrick as MA Gov. As VP, I’m not bothered by his being garden-variety in substance. My threshold for VP is that if they have to assume the Presidency then they need to get the country to the next election without running it over a cliff – don’t allow the barbarian hordes (Koch brothers, Tea Party types, etc) to overrun the place and no strategic nuclear exchanges with foreign adversaries. I think he can manage that.

>She’s stumbled into a job she’s great at, where she has a bully pulpit for as long as she wants – remember, we in MA elect our senators for life.

With that in mind, Coakley losing to Brown was a gift. She would have been near impossible to displace. Without Sen. Brown I doubt we’d have Sen. Warren. (Would Warren have run for Kerry’s seat?)

@RNB 06.09.16 at 11:45 pm

>On Sanders he is not as far to the left as you think

I know and have said that he wasn’t perfect, but even in those areas or cases where he was or had been unimpressive, he was still much better than Clinton. To put it in familiar language, Sanders was the lesser evil needed to keep Clinton (and pretty much everyone else in the same triangulating crowd) out of office.

>So when you come up with an argument for why I should not vote for Clinton to keep Trump out of office, wake me up

Oh no, *you* and other HRC-ists don’t get to play the ‘lesser evil’ card. You were the ones who did your best to make sure the only alternative to Trump would be Clinton, *before* it was inevitable. Now the responsibility for all of her future actions is on you. That will be little consolation, unfortunately.

@164 OK so you don’t have any argument as to why I should not vote for Clinton to keep Trump out of office.

Unlike the Bernie or Bust people on this list, I was always clear that I would vote for Sanders were he the nominee. I have been focused perhaps more than anyone on this list on Trump’s racism from the beginning and feared from the outset that his racism would propel him to the Republican nomination when this was (pun intended) a minority position. I would have happily voted for Sanders to defeat Trump.

But more importantly if Clinton wins you’ll have a tough time proving that Sanders wouldn’t have done what Clinton will do that angers you (drones, another NATO action in Libya, even a no-fly zone in Syria that he explicitly did not rule out, redeployment in Afghanistan) or that Sanders would have got better social policy actually passed (doubtful of course) or that Sanders would not have done bad things (put off immigration reform or blocking imports from poor countries that could have dire consequences on those countries or let banks collapse taking the economy into The Greater Depression) or that a Sanders nomination wouldn’t have led to a Trump victory that would have led to things worse than what would have happened in a Clinton administration.

Sanders a decent person whom I would have enthusiastically voted for in spite of my disagreements has lost; you ridiculously exaggerate my role in this !

The emails are not doing Clinton in. And you haven’t provided me one reason not to vote for Clinton to keep Trump out of office.

@milx 06.10.16 at 2:57 am
>But … if you really can’t understand why someone [okay, maybe only nominally] on the left is happy about her nomination then you’re not being particularly honest.

Well, ‘maybe only nominally’ certainly does a lot of work here. In the actual context, being happy about HRC’s nomination means being happy that it’s her *as opposed to Sanders*. I.e. it means that you consider her a better candidate than him. I honestly don’t see any good reasons for any (not-only-nominal) leftist to think so, and even your own presentation, which ignores, among other things, the difference in the candidate’s actual records, doesn’t give any.

Compare: I’d have preferred Italy to win Euro 2012 but I’m happy about Spain’s win. (This isn’t actually true, but the point is it makes sense.)

No, you can be happy with second-best even when there are only two choices. There’s really no problem with this at all.

@js. 06.10.16 at 4:12 am
>No, you can be happy with second-best even when there are only two choices. There’s really no problem with this at all.

Second best out of two? Why not be unhappy about the best of the two, since it’s actually the second worst?

Thanks Eszter, that’s a great image.

I really hope the US experience with having a female presidential candidate, and President if she makes it, will work out better than ours did. (By which I mean, Julia Gillard was a decent and competent Australian Prime Minister but she still suffered from unbelievable levels of misogyny and sexism, including some from her own side of politics).

And on the topic of vice presidential candidates, here is something for those who may think that we feminists sometimes exaggerate – this is the first comment I saw when I was reading an article in the Guardian about Elizabeth Warren as a potential VP:

Jason Ma

They look too much like a lesbian couple together. It’d be wise for Clinton to choose a male running mate in my opinion.

Seriously, you couldn’t make this stuff up.

A casual perusal of the history of catastrophic vice presidential candidates is not especially instructive. Was Sarah Palin significantly worse than Dan Quayle? It’s not clear whether the selection or the dumping of Tom Eagleton was worse, and I suspect few would argue that Agnew added to Nixon’s luster in 1968.

Let’s recycle Al Gore! Think of all the bumper stickers and yard signs we could re-use! That ticket won twice, and maybe the promise of Gore made it work. Isn’t that the appeal of Game of Thrones?

Tabasco @149

‘Why do people always reach for Margaret Thatcher when talking about women political leaders?
‘She wasn’t the first (Bandaranaike); …’

Bandaranaike may have been the first woman to be elected to be national leader, but she wasn’t the first woman to be national leader.

If I had to guess, I would guess that Thatcher is mentioned more often as an example by Anglophones because she was the first woman elected as national leader of an Anglophone country. This may not be a good reason, but it does at least offer some kind of explanation.

Suzanne, I am afraid that I do not see it that way, and many of my peers feel the same way (yes, even young women of color!) Now, a solid number who feel this way will also vote for her – not everyone’s vote is as purely symbolic as mine. But your abrupt dismissal of something my peers and I have been upset about for some time is… curious, to say the least.

I could go on about specific things, but I don’t much see the point. I will note that David Brock has been running a major part of Clinton’s messaging campaign, and that said campaign also at one point hired a brigade of internet trolls. David Brock is a shameless propagandist, and a veteran of the rightwing art of the smear campaign – is there any wonder that people are coming away with negative feelings?

LFC@150
” You (H. Frant) evidently learned little or nothing from that discussion.”

I didn’t find the discussion very illuminating, if that’s what you mean. I wasn’t trying here to define the other meaning (call it the Monbiot meaning for short) of neoliberalism. I was commenting that it has nothing to do with Clinton. What I was trying to do in that other discussion, evidently unsuccessfully, is to keep the word from being applied to the American center-left as if it indicated some intellectual connection between Clinton and Thatcher. There is no mystical connection between the two words; they are constructed from different meanings of “neo-” and different meanings of “liberal.” Clinton is not a neoliberal in Monbiot’s sense, as anyone can see from your discussion @150. People should stop calling her that, as it only leads to confusion. Well, perhaps not confusion, as people are already using it as a generalized insult, with no clear idea what it means.

JeffreyG@159

Fair enough. Now, how has Clinton failed to show due respect to you/your generation?

” I’d vastly prefer to have the comment replaced by a placeholder like [This comment has been deleted by the moderator] or some such.”

I think it should be : ” [This comment has been deleted by (person’s name).” First, because it clarifies. And then second, because I imagine it will give more pleasure to the person doing the deleting anyway (always trying to help here), since a big reason for comment deletion is to Show Who Is In Charge – and what better way to punctuate one’s power trip than by signing it? harry b gives an entirely reasonable explanation for comment deletion, but c’mon that’s not why most comments are deleted. They are deleted because they are contrary to the moderator’s point of view.

Insulting, ad hominem comments – sure, delete them. Ow I don’t agree with this, “It’s my house, I can do what I want.”

As to Hillary, my eyes glaze over when people try to pretend this is a big step forward for women. Having the wife of a former President become President is what often happens in the third world. HRC’s advancement doesn’t show an improvement for women; it shows how much the USA has slid into third-world norms.

@ novakant, do you agree with this?

“But this celebration of the primary win because HRC is a woman is also a celebration of all the people who will predictably be killed by HRC, because I don’t think that there was exact equivalence between candidates and bases between Clinton and Sanders either.”

And this?

“It depends on why we get an (unlikely) Trump Presidency. The more likely reason for this unlikely result is that HRC can’t convince young voters to turn out for her and is in general a bad campaigner, and if that’s the reason then yes, this post will stand as a fine illustration of how in victory Clinton supporters really had nothing better to do than to rehearse their resentments about Bernie Bros and their impossible desire for political perfection.”

Or do you agree this is rank nonsense?

Yeah, I have clarified – running a dishonest campaign that eagerly smeared Sanders and his supporters. See David Brock, Bernie Bros, the falsehoods peddled on Sanders’ civil rights record by Clinton surrogates before super T, Clinton’s comments about ‘feeling sorry for young kids who don’t do their research’, the continued stream of lies about the FBI criminal investigation, the dismissal of young women who support Bernie (they do it for the boys!), her complete bullshitting on the question of the SS payroll cap (insisting that she had he same position as S but not agreeing when asked directly), the hiring of a brigade of Internet trolls to harass pro Bernie people , her lack of credible stance on the TPP ( state dept set to release her emails on the matter on Nov 31st – not just after the election but on a day that doesn’t exist- suck), nearly everything on healthcare, and not ever actually looking into those Wall Street transcripts despite her conditions being met and her promising to look into them.

Throw in a couple white noise generators, a strong messaging apparatus that works diligently to spoon-feed Narrative to career-minded journalists, and half a year without an unscripted press conference for good measure. I do not get the impression that she is interested in honestly informing the American people about where she stands on major issues.

Note – My support for Clinton was never going to be happy. She remains a warmonger of the highest order, for instance, and that is never something to happily endorse. Resigned to the inevitability is a much better description of the mental state in question than happy.

Howard Frant,

“Neoliberal” fits perfectly well, when applied to Clinton. The label was pretty much invented by Charles Peters (as LFC points to, above), at the Washington Monthly, though it has snowballed/morphed from there to include much more than just the conflicted center left:

A Neo-Liberal’s Manifesto

I also agree with his additions:

“In that meaning the word refers, inter alia, to an emphasis on privatization, deregulation, ‘free’ trade agreements, imposition of fiscal discipline on poorer countries via the IMF, and often attacks on welfare or public goods provision, to name a few. Thatcherism is one instance, but far from exhausts it.”

A good way NOT to be confused by the word “liberal” within the label is just to think of it the same way propertarians do: The liberalization of markets. The Clintons are all for that. They’re all for certain right-libertarian constructs in general, with regard to those markets, but they veer away from them toward the “conservative” by also supporting a social safety net. That social safety net was originally a conservative idea, not left-wing. Right-libertarians, OTOH, are under the delusion that their udopia (no social welfare, an all-privatized economy) would last more than a second or two. They’re convinced that capitalism without massive state support would more than just survive, it would supposedly thrive like never before.

In reality, it would die a very quick and bloody death. No economic system in history requires “Big Government” like capitalism.

“That social safety net was originally a conservative idea, not left-wing.”

Not sure how to interpret this claim but I know that in the 1930s the idea of establishing a social safety net did not emerge from the American right-wing unless we’re now stretching terms so far that they’ve lost any kind of historical meaning.

@ JeffreyG, that strikes me as a far-from-objective list. All the campaigns were dishonest. HRC did not coin ‘Bernie Bros’ , did not make the comment about young women. The ‘research’ comment came in response to an attack from Sanders which fact checkers found largely false. Clinton is certainly conflicted by past associations, positions, statements, votes, but then, so is Sanders. If one justifies one’s use of one’s Senate seat to provide cover for gun manufacturers, because of one’s constituency and the need to get re-elected (as Sanders did!), it takes some chutzpah to then turn around and accuse another of hypocrisy for the same sort of behavior.

I like Bernie’s positions better, and I like him better, and I voted for him. But refusing to vote for the Democratic nominee, out of pique and personal affront, is crazy.

@190 John Lewis’ questioning of Bernie Sanders’ youthful civil rights commitments was a low point in the Clinton campaign. It was unjustified. Nothing like that was said at CT by anyone preferring to Clinton over Sanders as far as I can remember.

Again my slogan for the next 4+ months is NO BFD (No Big Fraud Don). Thank you.

Be that as it may (and with the acknowledgement that using a social safety net to preserve an autocratic or neoliberal capitalist regime may ultimately be reifying a right-wing) in the US the expansion of welfare has always coincided with left-wing control of government. Perhaps from a purely Bolshevik perspective any kind of governance that does not ultimately lead to a dictatorship of the proletariat is “right-wing,” but in the reality the rest of us live in the right-wing is eternally hostile to any kind of social safety net (cf the last century of American politics).

I find it interesting that Rich is complaining at such elaborate length about the moderation policies here, when this complaining is compared with his behavior in comments over the past several months.

I personally dislike silent deletion or silent permanent moderation of comments. From this side it feels like a power play, as one is left wondering what karmic guilt load has contributed to this. It’s only happened to me once or twice on this blog but I don’t blame Phil for feeling upset about it. FWIW I assume RNB was banned temporarily for longwindedness and aggressiveness, as I don’t see anything wrong with most of what he says. But it is extremely unpleasant to take part in a comments section when a significant proportion of the commenters are trying to game the system, or when the frontpagers view all commenters as potential hostile adversaries.

Rich:

Can you provide evidence? I didn’t think so.

OK Layman- first I will note that you aimed here for the easy targets, not the hard ones. You are oddly silent on the non-disclosure of her Wall Street speeches, for instance. Or that whole FBI thing. Or the smearing of Bernie Sanders’ civil rights record by a journalist married to a Clinton operative just before many Southern states were set to vote.

But because I have already started, lets play ball:

“HRC did not coin ‘Bernie Bros’ ” – David Brock took this narrative and ran with it, there are reporters on record saying that they were pitched this story by the HRC campaign. Are you trying to claim that the HRC campaign is not partly responsible for this narrative? Reference the ‘Obama boys’ narrative in 2008.

“did not make the comment about young women.” – Her campaign has been pushing this line continuously, effacing the strong support that Sanders has from young women, and only backed down on this after it completely backfired. This was the logical continuation of a message they were pushing for a while, only retracted when they overstepped their limits. If you don’t think that this was an incredibly hurtful message sent to young female leftists, I question how many you interact with on a day-to-day basis.

“The ‘research’ comment came in response to an attack from Sanders which fact checkers found largely false.” –

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaign-updates/hillary-clintons-connection-oil-gas-industry/
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/09/hillary-clinton-fracking-shale-state-department-chevron
You can spin it all you like, but ‘oh its just from a bundler’ or ‘oh its just her super PAC/

“to provide cover for gun manufacturers” –
This reminds me of another howler: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-vermont-guns-responsible-for-new-york-violence/ ; around this same time she was trying to link Sanders to the Sandy Hook shooting too. Shameless if you ask me.

“refusing to vote for the Democratic nominee, out of pique and personal affront, is crazy.”

Of course, you conveniently leave out all my issues with her corruption, dishonestly, and warmongering as the baseline for all of this, but tbh I wasn’t expecting an honest hearing to begin with.

Oh, and you also neglect the part where one of the dominant arguments put forward by her campaign – her presumed viability vs the Repubs in November – stands in great jeopardy due to the pending criminal investigation by the FBI, something which she has continuously lied to the American people about. Claims that it was ‘allowed’, that she was not hacked, that there was no sensitive intelligence on the server – all have been demonstrated as falsehoods by official reports.

Call me crazy all you like, but I am not excited for this to be the sort of standard setting at the leadership of the democratic party:
http://abc11.com/news/how-clinton-donor-got-on-sensitive-intelligence-board/1379818/

@186: I think we can safely say that the eyes of feminists of Clinton’s generation are not glazed over at the thought. They know how far the country, and Clinton, have had to come to get to where they are now.

In Clinton’s youth, the prospect of any woman becoming president was remote. She has worked very hard at building her own resume and is far from the stalwart Congressional widow finishing out her husband’s term.

As Val has pointed out before, the U.S. still lags behind other developed countries in the political advancement of women. In the U.S., the president is both head of the government and head of state and thus carries a huge symbolic load (not to mention the title “Commander-in-Chief”). The United States is also the only superpower. To put a woman in that office is a very big deal indeed.

engels @ 36: “I posted four lines of anti-Clinton emojis in response to the pro-Clinton emojis and they appeared then vanished. […] And I am now seemingly in the Kafkaesque position of reading people discuss the fact that there has been no prevention of disagreement whilst being prevented from disagreeing with them. The emojis were not rude in any way and referenced Clinton’s imperialism […]”

Me @ 72: “I figured that engels’ comments were deleted because of some CT *technical issue*, not deliberately, but with Phil saying it happened too it’s more likely that it was deliberate […] I should have trusted my judgement that this thread was likely to be edited in this way.”

Garrulous @ 94: “The aggressive moderation policy on this thread is ill-conceived, insulting and unnecessary. I can only imagine it will do some damage to conversation on this site. ”

Eszter Haatgittai: “About half a dozen have been deleted, completely consistent with the comments policy […] You can create conspiracy theories about comment deletion and moderation, but know that it is not a reflection of reality. […] So if something doesn’t show up right away, that is not because someone is wronging you, it is some *technical function* of the system.”

It’s funny how trust works.

@ JeffreyG

“Or that whole FBI thing.”

I didn’t respond to that because it is pointless until (as I said) you actually articulate a crime for which you think she could plausibly be charged, given the facts we have. If there is no more to the email server story than what is in the public record, then what is the crime? If your insistence is that there could be a crime we don’t know about, well, that’s pretty much true of anyone.

I’ve said I don’t like HRC. I think she’s out of touch with much of reality and has genuinely bad judgment about many things – the Wall Street chumminess and profiteering is just one example. I’d prefer to vote for Sanders, despite his own manifest flaws, because I think he grasps the urgency of the need for more drastic change in a way HRC doesn’t and seemingly never will. But, you know, Sanders lost the primary, and he won’t be the nominee, and either Trump or HRC will win the election. I know which outcome I would prefer, and sitting on my hands like a petulant child isn’t the answer.

Eszter H.
” The reality is that comments go into moderation for reasons not clear to anyone, certainly not to me. So if something doesn’t show up right away, that is not because someone is wronging you, it is some technical function of the system.”

Noted.
My apologies if it sounded like I was insinuating that you were deleting my posts. That was not my intention and I suspect no such thing.

“sitting on my hands like a petulant child isn’t the answer”

1 – you feel better now that you got that out of your system Layman?

2 – I would like to hear you explain how my voting for HRC will in any way impact the final result of the national election. (Here is a quick hint – it wont). The only way my vote has an impact is by voting third party, in the case where that third party achieves the 5% threshold.

“I would like to hear you explain how my voting for HRC will in any way impact the final result of the national election. (Here is a quick hint – it wont). ”

Then why bother talking about it? What, after all, was the point of this:

“You can count this ‘Bernie Bro’ out.”

??

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
—Obi Wan Emoji

“As I said earlier, neoliberalismA was largely about using markets to reach progressive goals. ”

There’s a thousand-comment thread in the archives from a recent posting and it isn’t worth rehashing. Please go read it. Suffice it to say your statement is a very mild version of one of about six major axes of Peters (US) neoliberalism.

“So perhaps harry b or someone else cd explain it to me”

#imwithher forward-facing arrow emoji

@LFC — It’s an ‘H’ with an arrow pointing rightward through it. Which is Clinton’s campaign symbol or logo or whatever it’s called. I guess the image in-post means that you can go create your own avatar using that logo, but this isn’t really something I’ve looked into. (This helps tho because I first thought Harry meant the Twitter emoji image and was confused what Harry wasn’t getting about it.)

Oh, I didn’t see the H part of the logo, just the arrow. Thanks js.

engels & js. — thanks for the explanation

the temp. name — yup i got the sequence of presidents thing. It was the other thing (that’s now been explained to me) that i didn’t get. For one thing I managed to escape knowing that an H w/ an arrow through it was one of the — or maybe the, period — HRC campaign logo.

p.s. and definitely happen to me.

@RNB
Given Biden’s age and decades around the track, I doubt he wants to be VP another 4 years. Even if he does: fresh(er) blood, enough is enough.

I saw the explanations above, but found them unconvincing

and the arrow is pointing to the Right.
(someone said it means ‘hospital this way.’)

@Ronan
on the off-chance you’re not joking (which you probably are), google “Hillary logo”. plus, if I’d scrutinized the bumper sticker on a car parked around here I’d have prob seen the arrow, but I just registered it as an HRC bumper sticker w/o bothering to look closely at the design.

I honestly wasn’t convinced by the claims above, but then i googled it and see what they’re getting at. I genuinely thought it was h > b.

I see that the sarcasm might make this difficult to interpret, so, to be clear – yes, it *is* a good thing that it’s demonstrated that a woman, or a black person, or any other member of a historically underprivileged group can become head of state. However, this can only be a legitimate argument in favour of a candidate, or a good reason to celebrate the candidate’s victory enthusiastically, or the main story of an election, if there is virtually no significant difference between the candidates besides their identity

Thanks for putting us in our place. No. The exclusion from social, political and economic power structures of women and POC is a major structural issue involving differences in reward for labour, access to effecting change and a whole raft of other major problems. You can handwave HRC’s gender as “merely identity” but we’re over 50% of the population. The fact that all of the presidents up to the last one have been white males is not just some irrelevant notion of “identity”. The fact that so many brocialists and manarchists are white men themselves suggests to me that some people are extremely protective of their own identity, but are not aware of it.

@J-D 06.10.16 at 5:44 am
>People who admire Clinton have a variety of reasons for doing so … and it’s extremely unreasonable to expect otherwise.

Certainly, but the OP appeared to cite both of the aforementioned positions as compatible with each other. Of course, my real point was the incompatibility of both positions with their proponents’ own stated views and with the facts.

Cranky Observer @249

Sorry. That was sarcasm. Next time I’ll put it in italics.

Now, when you say, “her circle’s neoliberal preferences,” which particular preferences are you talking about? And wouldn’t it be more informative to tell us that in the first place? Or do they come as a package?

I for one would love to see just a single CT thread about the election that didn’t descend into this killary=trump bullshit, and if that means aggressive comment deletion then bring it on.

CT has really degenerated since all the armchair socialists decided Bernie “sanctions” sanders is the purest form of revolution, and Clinton the first American political leader ever to hurt anyone … disappointing that I have to go to LGM if I want to read anything vaguely analytical about the election because of the way these comment threads get berned down by rich white dudes who have nothing to lose from a trump presidency salivating over the chaos it will cause.

It would be nice if we could have just one comment thread about how great it is that a woman gets to win something. But I guess American sexism will spoil even that..

@Faustusnotes
the way these comment threads get berned down by rich white dudes who have nothing to lose from a trump presidency salivating over the chaos it will cause.

As far as I can tell, there is almost none of that in this particular thread. And my further impression is that the majority of people who voted for Sanders and comment here are going to vote for HRC in the fall. I certainly am.

It would be nice if we could have just one comment thread about how great it is that a woman gets to win something.

Many of the comments in this thread are about that. I said specifically upthread that while I voted for Sanders in the primaries, I do see HRC’s victory as an important milestone in US politics. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to suspend all criticism and just yell ‘hooray hooray hooray’, but if someone wants to do that for a while and then return to the actual world, so to speak, I have no particular problem with it.

I have to go to LGM if I want to read anything vaguely analytical about the election

Are the posts at LGM about the election mainly analytical, or are they mainly polemical (not that the two things are nec. mutually exclusive)?

Since most of the action has moved to the more recent Trump post (because all election posts are Trump posts because this is America and we can’t have nice things), I’ll leave this here.

on the issue of ‘discipline’ for third world governments from the IMF, it’s important to look at both the fiscal measure or goal, and the content of reform suggested by the IMF. There is a difference between demanding social welfare cuts and reforms that target existing monopolies, political corruption and lack of accountability etc. The latter is more accurate a description of what the IMF usually wants reform to be.

On topic, I’ve not seen any suggestions for VP that wow me. Both Warren and Sherrod Brown will be more valuable counting toward a Senate majority. It will surely not be Biden – someone younger is called for. It will not be Bernie – age again, Senate majority again. O’Malley is younger, but not impressive, especially considering that the whole point of his primary campaign was to position himself for something like the VP slot, and he was underwhelming as a candidate.

So, who?

This
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/democrats-will-learn-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-brush-with-bernie-20160609
As I said earlier, HC won by keeping Warren, Brown and Biden out of the race. She shouldn’t confuse a tactical victory with a strategic one. I’m not optimistic.

Engels @261

Yes, I have heard the Snowden quote, and it sounds deep until you start to think about it. “The lesser of two evils is also evil.” OK, but the greater of two evils is also evil, and it’s, you know, worse. As far was we know, there will either be a Clinton presidency or a Trump presidency, and no third alternative. So which do you prefer?

which do you prefer?

Hillary—that’s the ‘lesser’ part. The ‘deep’ part is that if you support her, you’re supporting evil.

engels @269

So when you, engels, are preferring Hillary, are you preferring evil?

Sorry, but I won’t have a single child of any gender be killed by a bomb so you can feel happy about a woman’s being president.

That is a silly and disingenuous distortion of what I said, which was to disagree with the brocialist idea that only class and income matters and gender and race are mere identity politics, frills, decoration.
Does your boundless compassion extend to the grown women killed by US policies on abortion, or is that OK because we’re not (as your comment hints at) human?

Thanks, RNB.

engels @271

If I say to people ‘You are supporting evil’, they are going to think that I am trying to make them feel bad about what they’re doing and that I’m trying to discourage them from doing it. That’s not rocket science either. (Incidentally, it turns out that ‘It’s Not Rocket Science Dude Limited’ is a private limited company registered in the UK — it was the top hit when I searched the Web for the phrase ‘rocket science dude’. I was disappointed; I wanted to find somebody out there who is using the self-applied description ‘Rocket Science Dude’. I can’t find ‘Brain Surgery Dude’ either.)

So, when you write that people who support Clinton are supporting evil, are you aware that the likely effect is that they will think that you are trying to make them feel bad about supporting Clinton and trying to discourage them from supporting Clinton? is that your intention?

J-D — Did you use to comment here under a different handle? You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to (obviously).

js.

“J-D — Did you use to comment here under a different handle? You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to (obviously).”

J-D is a regular commenter on John Quiggin’s blog under this name. I don’t think he would have commented on Crooked Timber under a different name.

engels @278

‘J-D when you ask people endless questions with seemingly obvious answers and no apparent purpose are you aware the likely effect is that they will think that you are trying to annoy the living shit out of them?’

1. The answer to the question I asked you may be obvious to you, but it’s not obvious to me, or I wouldn’t have asked the question.
2. The purpose of my asking that question may not be apparent to you, but I did have a purpose that was clear to me, and which I am prepared to explain on request.
3. I am aware that sometimes my asking of questions has the effect of annoying people, so it would be natural if people sometimes think that annoying them is my purpose, even though it isn’t.

So, that’s your question answered; now, what about mine?

js. @279
No, I’ve never commented here under a different screen-name, but that’s the second time somebody here has asked me that (perhaps it was you the first time as well; I can’t remember). Curious.

Seriously, guys, could we stop with the silent deletions? I spent a quarter of an hour last night working on a quiet & reasonable reply to Eszter @212 – having refamiliarised myself with the comments policy – and this morning, pouf! no comment.

Tell me to shut up & I’ll shut up. I’m just not crazy about being shut up, especially without any warning or acknowledgment.

Collin Street @284

I feel as if I’ve provided an answer to your question by demonstration before you asked it. At comment 278 engels asked me a question which I felt contained false presuppositions; in my comment at 283 I discussed those points and then provided an answer to the question taking account of those issues. That’s the why I’d like people to answer my questions when they think those questions contain false presuppositions.

You make a good point, though, about ‘Are you aware’ questions; I’ll try to remember that and modify my approach in future. Thanks for that.

JD (curious to know whether your last name is ‘Sports’ of ‘Wetherspoon’) you need to think about the difference between being a Socratic gadfly and this:

engels: “The issue isn’t whether class, gender or race matter, it’s whether the class, gender or race of a politician matters more than his or her policies and track record. American liberals think it does – everyone with a brain thinks it doesn’t…”

This is, well, nonsense. It ignores the fact that (at least some of those) American liberals don’t agree with you about the policies and track record, doesn’t it?

>Does your boundless compassion extend to the grown women killed by US policies on abortion, or is that OK because we’re not (as your comment hints at) human?

Of course not. I did explicitly say in my comment that I only care about *male* children killed by bombs and *male* workers being fired, didn’t I? Why do I need to repeat myself? I have *always* been a staunch supporter of genocide against women! Sarcasm aside, that’s even more silly and disingenuous. I made it clear that my position is, in my conviction, the one I consider *appropriate* for a human, from an ethical standpoint. And naturally, I contrasted that with the position of *Hillary supporters*, not with women. The rhetoric of equating ‘Hillary supporters’ and ‘women’ (by using the 1st person plural) is, again, as manipulative as it gets.

BTW, I note that you have been honoured with The RNB Prize for Disingenuousness at 273, so congratulations. As far as I can tell, it’s richly deserved. Anyway, your comments are so close to trolling that I see it as pointless to engage with you from now on.

The modern CT thread : a cavalcade of people declaring they don’t want to speak to each other anymore.

Who goes into the Internet to tell someone that?

On @212 (not meant as a direct reply to EH): Some people seem to think there’s a hard and fast binary choice between “there’s a person making deliberate choices about everything for reasons,” and “stuff just happens and no one understands it.” If one knows how computers work and why some things are more feasible than others, that becomes less plausible.

@Helen 06.12.16 at 1:12 am
>Does your boundless compassion extend to the grown women killed by US policies on abortion …

I said I wouldn’t respond any further, but I belatedly realise that I forgot to react to this little gem. Apparently, my arguing against HRC in the primary in connection with FP and economic issues somehow implies my arguing against… the right to abortion?! Sanders being, presumably, an anti-abortion candidate, in the parallel universe under discussion. On the odd chance that you aren’t trolling, you really … need some rest, or something.

F. Foundling: “one little tiny thing one can do about such things is oppose candidates with a more warmongering record/policies and support those with a less warmongering record/policies.”

Yes, I got that, but I assumed I must be wrong, since this approach will not stop hypothetical children from being bombed, and it would be a bit absurd to hypothesize a particular child who would only be bombed in the one case but not in the other. Which child, and why THAT particular child and not another?

That aside, there are several other things things wrong with your sanctimonious priggery, for example:

– Someone could genuinely believe that this female candidate is also the one least likely to bomb children. I get that you don’t believe that, but you’re guessing, so perhaps a less insulting approach to objecting is called for? Or is it that you think 13 million people cast votes for HRC because they expect and want her to bomb children?
– Someone could be unhappy with the candidate while at the same time be encouraged that the electorate chose a woman for the first time. Yes, this is a complicated view to hold in one’s mind, but people are complicated things, and I assure you that some people hold this view.
– Someone could believe that HRC stands the best chance of beating the Republican nominee, perhaps because of her political skills, perhaps because of favorable demographics, perhaps because Trump is particularly adept at angering women who vote, perhaps because of all these reasons and more. And also believe that supporting such a woman candidate would be a way to, I don’t know, ‘oppose candidates with a more warmongering record/policies and support those with a less warmongering record/policies.’

So, by all means, feel free to shut up now.