Advice for Hillary Clinton, her supporters and pro-Hillary media

Dear Friends,

Last night Bernie Sanders made a great speech to his supporters.  It was done over the internet (here) and as far as I can tell was not broadcast by anybody else.  In the speech he made two very clear points.  First, he said that the most important thing in the next five months was to defeat Donald Trump and that he would soon be devoting his time to obtain that result.  Second, he said that the political revolution must continue so that we can transform the Democratic Party and our country.  He did not endorse Hillary Clinton nor did he drop out of the race but neither did he mention his own candidacy for President or a third party.  He focused on transforming the Democratic Party and our country from within the Democratic Party.

Hillary Clinton has continually said during this campaign that she is working hard to earn everybody's vote.  The clear implication from Bernie Sanders' speech was that the ball is in her court to earn the votes and perhaps even the enthusiastic support of his supporters.  Unfortunately, so far Secretary Clinton has failed to make any attempt to earn the votes of the Sanders's supporters.  I can find no statement by her about the speech, not even an acknowledgement that it happened.  Ignoring Bernie Sanders will not help her earn the votes of his supporters.

Secretary Clinton was not the only one to ignore him, the media ignored him as well.  Rachel Maddow, who has been unable to hide her support for Hillary Clinton, gave his speech just a few minutes of coverage and in that time she ridiculed him and misconstrued what he had said.  In the part of the speech where Senator Sanders encouraged his supporters to get involved at all levels of politics to elect progressive candidates, he encouraged them to run for office.  What he was proposing was that the Democratic Party work to elect city council members, school board members, state legislators and governors in all 50 states.  Rachel Maddow's voice was full of ridicule as she reported that he encouraged his supporters to run for office.  This strategy has been incredibly successful for the Republicans.  Unfortunately, the Democratic Party establishment only embraces populist efforts to reach out to all people in Presidential elections.  Ridiculing what has been demonstrated to be a very effective strategy is not the way to earn the votes of Sanders' supporters.

My advice to Hillary Clinton (and her supporters) if she wants to earn the votes of Sanders' supporters is that she should:

• Truly, passionately and vocally embrace the new positions that she has taken on things like the TPP, Keystone Pipeline and drilling in the Arctic.
• Take the final step to eliminate small policy differences with Bernie Sanders on issues such as (1) fracking (If she is going to regulate it out of existence, why not just ban it?); (2) breaking up the big banks (She says she will consider it.  She has had plenty of time to consider it, and she has never made a cogent argument against it, so break up the big banks.); and (3) $15 an hour minimum wage (she says she supports the $15 an hour movement but refuses to endorse it stopping at $12 which while a big improvement falls short of lifting people out of poverty, so endorse a $15 an hour federal minimum wage.)
• Passionately embrace bold plans to transform our country including, significant tax increases on the very wealthy (Her very minimal increases are not sufficient to address our needs for funds or to reduce with the wealth and income inequality.) and meaningful infrastructure spending (Her proposal for $275 billion is without detail and completely insufficient to meet our needs and stimulate our economy.  Consider a plan more like Senator Sanders' detailed plan for $1 trillion.)
• Embrace healthcare as a right and lay out a clear plan for how her changes in Obamacare will lead to healthcare for all.
• On issues where she cannot in good faith move toward Senator Sanders' positions, engage in an open dialogue about those issues in which she truly listens and engages even if she does not ultimately change her position.  
• Demonstrate her commitment to getting big money out of politics.  Even though she takes big money, lay out a clear plan for how she will move from our money tainted and broken system today to a political and economic system not dominated by big money in the future.
• Enthusiastically embrace the reformation of the Democratic Party's primary process: eliminate caucuses; eliminate super delegates; hold open, same day registration primaries; and ban big money contributions to the DNC as President Obama did.
• Do not rely on the "I'm better than Donald Trump" approach.  Demonstrate that she is progressive and wants the Democratic Party and the country to transform itself.
• Appoint a true progressive, not an incrementalist, as her vice president.

There are, of course, many other things that Secretary Clinton could, and I hope, will do but these might give the Sanders' supporters the confidence in her that they need in order to vote for her and perhaps even work hard for her election not just against the election of Donald Trump.

Thanks for reading and please comment,

The Unabashed Liberal

Voter Turnout

Dear Friends,

The Clinton campaign and its supporters have been spending a lot of time lately telling supporters of Bernie Sanders that they need to vote for Hillary Clinton or they are essentially voting for Donald Trump and that Bernie Sanders need to drop out of the race and work for Hillary Clinton because he has no chance of winning.  Besides Hillary Clinton has already announced that she is the nominee.  I have read a couple of articles that are worth your time to read.

The first is by Seth Abramson on Huffpost Politics entitled " How to Explain the Sanders Campaign to an Idiot, Paul Krugman or a Clintonite in 8 Sentences" (here).  Despite the snarkiness of the title, the post contains a cogent argument for why the Sanders campaign should continue until all the votes are cast at the Democratic convention.

The second is a post by Jake Johnson on Common Dreams entitled "No, I Won't Work for Hillary Clinton: A Response to Robert Reich" (here).  It is a very thoughtful and thought provoking piece in response to a Facebook post by Robert Reich (here) who had given advice to the supporters of Hillary Clinton and to the supporters to Bernie Sanders.  The advice to the supporters of Bernie Sanders is as it always is - Hillary Clinton is better than Donald Trump and if you do not vote for her you are essentially voting for Donald Trump and how can you stand to do that.  Anyway, while I will vote for Hillary Clinton if she is the nominee, the post certainly made me think.

All of this talk of blaming Sanders' supporters if Hillary Clinton gets the nomination and loses to Donald Trump got me thinking about voter turnout.  So I did some research.

Counting caucuses, Bernie Sanders has received probably somewhere around 11,000,000 votes so far.  For my purposes I would divide that group into a group of Democrats like me who vote every election and certainly every Presidential election and for whom this year will be no different.  The other group is a group of people who do not vote every election or even every Presidential election.  Who knows the percentages but let's say 50/50.  So maybe by the time the voting is done there will be   7,000,000 but certainly less 10,000,000 Sanders' supporters who are at risk of not voting.  That sounds like a large number, and it is but it pales compared to the number of Americans who just plain do not vote.

A little over a year ago, the Pew Research Center published a report on the voter turnout for the 34 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (here), basically the world's leading industrialized democracies.  Of the 34 countries, the United States ranked 31st in turns of voter turnout with just 53.6% of voting age people voting.  Belgium ranked first with 87.2% of voting age population, and Germany was right in the middle at 17th with 66% of voting age population.  To put these percentages into perspective.  In 2008 Obama got 69.3 million votes and beat McCain by 9.7 million votes.  If 66% of the voting age population had voted (same as Germany), there would have been an additional 17.5 million votes cast, more than double the margin of victory.  If 87.2% of the voting age population had voted (same as Belgium), there would have been an additional 65.3 million votes, almost 7 times the margin of victory.

The problem with the American electoral system is that we do not have a culture of voting.  I believe in large part the lack of voting is the direct result of the lack of exciting candidates and the almost constant problem of voting for the lesser of two evils.  I calculated the percentage of the voting age population that the winners in the last nine Presidential elections.  In only two elections did the winner get more than 30% of the voting age population - Reagan in 1984 with 31.1% and Obama in 2008 with 30.7%.  The average is about 27%, just over a quarter of the voting age population voted for the person who became President.  A democracy should not work like that.

This year both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are making the lesser of two evils argument all the time.  Donald Trump's best argument for Republicans and Independents is that he is not Hillary Clinton and many Republicans and Independents will vote for him as the lesser of two evils.  Hillary Clinton's best argument for Democrats and Independents is that she is not Donald Trump and many Democrats (including me) and Independents will vote for her if she gets the nomination for just that reason - the lesser of two evils.

As a country, we must do more to develop a culture of voting so that the majority can govern.  We could start with automatic voter registration and a national holiday for election day.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Hillary Clinton makes her own problems

Dear Friends,

I have long believed that Hillary Clinton is a flawed candidate and not just because of her policies and positions.  She continues to create problems for herself.  Two of these problems were apparent upon reading the news this morning.

First, the State Department's Inspector General (not the Republicans) came out with a report severely criticizing Secretary Clinton for using her personal email account for official business.  One need only read the first paragraph of the story in The New York Times (here) about the report.

The State Department’s inspector general on Wednesday sharply criticized Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, saying that she had not sought permission to use it and would not have received it if she had.

Buried deep in the first section of The New York Times this morning (here) was an article comparing the Clinton campaign's spin on what the Inspector General's report said with the reporter's analysis.  Here are a couple of the comparisons.  The bold is from a statement by the Clinton campaign.  The rest is the reporter writing.

From the statement: “The inspector general documents just how consistent her email practices were with those of other secretaries and senior officials at the State Department who also used personal email.”
Only one other secretary of state — Colin L. Powell — exclusively used his personal email for official communications. Condoleezza Rice said she did not use personal or government email. Madeleine K. Albright did not use email, which was in its infancy when she was in the job. Secretary of State John Kerry said he occasionally used personal email, mostly to reply to people who emailed him on his personal account. But the report said that after discussing the issue with his aides and other staff members, “he began primarily using his department account to conduct official business.”
“As this report makes clear, Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email was not unique, and she took steps that went much further than others to appropriately preserve and release her records.”
Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email and server stored in her home was, in fact, unique. She left the State Department without turning over any emails, and only did so after she was contacted by the department’s lawyers, who were under pressure to produce documents from the House Select Committee on Benghazi. The 55,000 pages of emails she delivered did not include anything from the first three months of her tenure.

If Secretary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, Donald Trump will use this report and her campaign's statements to attack her as being untrustworthy and lacking judgment.  Her statements and those of her campaign about her emails are at best misleading and at worst completely inaccurate.  Since she will want to attack Donald Trump as being untrustworthy and lacking judgment, he will easily distract with his own attack on the same issues.  The conclusion of the public will, I am afraid, be that they are both untrustworthy and lack judgment.

This problem was not created by the Republicans or the press or Bernie Sanders, it was created by Hillary Clinton.  In my view it was some combination of bad judgement, arrogance and paranoia.

Problem number two results from her decision to back out of the fourth debate that she had agreed to have with Bernie Sanders before the California primary.  Let's be clear, she did not just decline to debate, she broke her agreement to have four debates including one before the California primary.

Of course the conventional political wisdom is that the frontrunner can only lose by having a debate.  I think Hillary Clinton is making a terrible mistake.  If she wins the nomination and wants to have Bernie Sanders' supporters vote for her, she needs to show that she listens to them, has views similar to them, respects them and will make big not just incremental changes.  Right now she is ignoring Senator Sanders and claiming out loud that she will be the nominee.  By breaking her agreement to debate, she is fueling the narrative that she cannot be trusted, that she is going to move to the right as soon as she can and that she doesn't really care about the issues that Senator Sanders' supporters do.

After last night when both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders said they would be willing to debate the other, Secretary Clinton's decision to break her agreement looks really bad.  If a Trump/Sanders debate happens, she will look even worse.  If Senator Sanders does really well in that debate, it will be clear to everybody that Senator Sanders will be a better candidate against Donald Trump than Secretary Clinton.

This problem was not created by the Republicans or the press or Bernie Sanders, it was created by Hillary Clinton.  Secretary Clinton does not understand that times have changed, that she should not be running her campaign according to the conventional political wisdom, and that if she wants the votes of the Bernie Sanders' supporters she needs to truly court them.

While it is a very narrow and steep path for Bernie Sanders to obtain the Democratic nomination, it is possible.  If Bernie Sanders has a big win in California, particularly if he debates Donald Trump and has a really good night, I would hope that the super delegates would face the reality that Bernie Sanders has the better positions and policies, is the better candidate and is the best bet to beat Donald Trump.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal