Complaining About Hillary's Campaign Book Is a Huge Waste of the Progressive Movement's Time.
Why aren't they focusing on the anti-democratic practices that split the Democratic Party?
With all the toxicity coming out of the White House and the GOP-dominated Congress, it's important to remember how insufferable were the politics of the neoliberal Democrats in power under Bill Clinton. The book under review (an article derived from the book is below) should help us remember how malignant were the Clinton years when it came to economic and social justice.
Two veteran Washington reporters mine a host of anonymous sources to give us a devastating portrait of a Hillary Clinton presidential effort that was a campaign without either a mission or a vision. Matt Taibbi takes a look.
Democrats were wrong to think that shifting demographics alone would hand them victory. What then determines whether workers respond to economic grievances with nativism or solidarity? In a word, organization.
Young voters were the only age bracket that Clinton actually won. We need to stop blaming them. Far from sitting on their hands, today's young voters are actively engaged. If the Clinton campaign is dissatisfied with their level of millennial support, they should take a hard look at where their young voter strategy failed.
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Did we do enough in 2016? And how can we build a broader electoral movement? I don't believe the Left bears the brunt of the blame for Hillary Clinton's defeat, and I reject arguments that try to score political points through guilt-tripping. Both long-term and short-term factors worked against a Clinton victory. Trump is not Reagan; 2016 is not 1980. But both elections were lost by tone-deaf Democratic elites who dismissed the economic anxieties of the working class.
The author says Hillary Clinton talked about the working class constantly. She had plans to help coal miners and steelworkers. She had plans to help those getting out of prison get jobs. She promoted clean energy jobs and spoke of the dignity of manufacturing jobs. The author argues that white Trump voters might just have been more interested in his attacks against Muslims and Hispanics.
There is no way to know whether Russian 'fake news' efforts proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers say it was part of a broadly effective strategy. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.
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