But Is Hillary Ready for Us?
But Is Hillary Ready for Us?
William Greider-- March 10, 2015
The not-yet candidate herself spoke to their concerns indirectly when she recently addressed the Silicon Valley Conference for Women. Clinton sketched out progressive goals for family-centered labor-market reforms. They were like love bombs for bleeding-heart liberals.
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The Clinton machine’s real target audience, I suspect, are the media pundits and political reporters who will cover the next campaign and inevitably shrink the terms of debate by reducing the substance to a handful of insipid, shorthand clichés. The expressions of what Hillary (maybe) thinks and says as a candidate are meant to assure big media that she truly is a progressive candidate and willing to get beyond the status quo.
This pre-conditioning strategy might very well succeed, at least with the press if not with voters. The makeover has already begun in the establishment press. An op-ed columnist at The New York Times extolled the Larry Summers conversion to liberal economics as significant news headlined “Establishment Populism Rising.” If Clinton is repackaged as a pragmatic “populist,” then the press can cast Elizabeth Warren (not to mention Bernie Sanders and others) as a reckless bomb-thrower. Adjectives like “angry” and “strident” are already being attached to her name.
But these are not normal times. The preliminary skirmishes are more meaningful this time because they reflect the profound crisis of identity that burdens the Democratic Party. What does the party really believe? Whose interests will the nominee truly fight for? Democrats lost their old soul long ago, as critics like myself repeatedly charged. The 2016 election could become the decisive moment that either transforms the party with an aggressively liberal economic agenda or clings to the past and the “corporate-friendly” straddle devised a generation ago by Bill Clinton’s New Democrats.
Trouble is, the New Dems are now the Old Guard. Their center-right program—financial deregulation and “free market” globalization—has not only run out of gas but is rightly blamed for laying the groundwork for financial catastrophe. Yet the New Dem wing still holds the high ground, with big money and loyal supporters as well as Clinton clones populating the key governing positions. The labor-liberal insurgency has a weak bench because for a generation its promising young people were excluded from governing ranks—systematically screened out by both Clinton and Obama administrations—if they showed telltale signs of leaning leftward or embracing non-conformist ideas that resonate with the party’s New Deal values.
By contrast, Republican regimes since Ronald Reagan have always made a point of appointing thousands of young right-wingers to second-level government posts as the training ground for long-term governance. Dems still invoke sentimental rhetoric from the New Deal era, but the practical reality is that the party’s economic policy makers went to school on Wall Street, either before or after their public service (sometimes both).
The gut question is: Can we believe the warm and fuzzy reassurances from the Clinton camp? In politics, after all, it is possible for leopards to change their spots into stripes, and they are often congratulated when they do. On the other hand, it is also true some leopards will change back again after they win the election. I suspect we voters will be arguing this question of credibility right up to the 2016 election.
I am impressed that some well-informed and much-admired economists on the left, like Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute and Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, are congratulating Larry Summers for changing his views. I hope they are right. So why am I not convinced?
Reading the CAP report on “inclusive prosperity,” I began to realize I had heard many of these new ideas long before. Then it hit me. Bill Clinton ran for president on some of the very same stuff back in 1992. His campaign theme in that election year was “Putting People First.” He spelled out his program in great detail, and it helped elect him, though he got less than a majority vote.
Clinton explained he would devote major federal spending to rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure and broadening social guarantees. He promised to protect working people and organized labor who correctly saw their jobs and wages threatened by the new trade agreement called NAFTA. He would go after big-business subsidies and scandalous tax loopholes. Attacking the bloated compensation for corporate executives was the core example of what Clinton intended. What’s not to like?
Within the first months, President Clinton reversed course or abandoned the meat of his promises. He passed NAFTA with Republican votes over labor’s opposition and cut a deal with Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan to let the Fed command a slow-growth economy.
Virtually all of the points made in the Summers report of 2015 could have been made twenty or twenty-five years ago when Bill Clinton was president. In fact, many of them were. Summers is careful to avoid the past, much less even hint at previous views that are now seen as blatantly wrong.
Much More and a Good Read....continued at:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/200897/hillary-ready-us
= new reply since forum marked as read
Fool me once...won't get fooled again 
The idea that we only have a handful
of potential Presidential candidates
and lackluster under-card candidates
is appalling.
Mary Landrieu, Allison Grimes 
I guess after Iraq they now expect us to believe anything.
Some DUers wonder why we have questions about the President.
I kid you not: Read Below or go to DU "Good Reads Forum" to see the OP and Replies. WTF?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016116524
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IN REPLY to this POST BELOW from DU "Good Reads" and 
to Poster Judi Lynn for Posting the Original Article:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/10/obamas-hard-turn-to-the-right-in-hemispheric-policy
Antagonizing Venezuela: Obama’s Hard Turn to the Right in Hemispheric Policy
March 10, 2015
Antagonizing Venezuela
Obama’s Hard Turn to the Right in Hemispheric Policy
by FREDERICK B. MILLS
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/10/obamas-hard-turn-to-the-right-in-hemispheric-policy
Does the Bolivarian cause in Venezuela threaten U.S. foreign policy? Venezuela has been at the forefront of regional integration ever since Hugo Chavez was first elected president in 1998. Chavez argued that a necessary condition for any nation in the region to depart from the Washington Consensus and forge an alternative economic policy is the independence and sovereignty of the region from imperial domination. He also promoted the idea that in a multi-polar world, the region would be more likely to diversify its trade relationships, experiment with complementary types of commerce, and avoid political submission to any power block on the planet. These ideas have actually been put into practice, bringing about an epochal change over the past sixteen years, that has led to the formation of ALBA, UNASUR, MERCOSUR, CELAC and other associations of Latin American and Caribbean nations that do not include the U.S. or Canada.
The recent CELAC—China conference in January is an example of this exercise of independence and multi-polarity. But none of this poses a threat to the American people or the state. It does however, challenge one of Obama’s major policy goals, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. This free trade accord would be much easier to sell at the Summit of the Americas next month in Panama should the Maduro Administration be ousted in time. But that would be a crude calculation.
The people of the United States can benefit from a partnership with the new Latin America and Caribbean that complements each peoples’ needs and resources; but it must be based on mutual respect for sovereignty, and that means a U.S. policy that does not resort to “arm twisting” to impose free trade and neoliberal economic policies on our neighbors to the South. This would take a re-evaluation of the present overall U.S. hemispheric policy and an immediate step back from the precipice.
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but...I think I understand where you are going. The "Left" as in "FireDogLake" and others tried with "Act Blue" to get Dem Candidates and were partially successful. But, if you mention "FireDogLake" the Website on DU these days you are laughed at...or derided in strongly worded terms....or ignored.
Maybe the Left can build on what we've learned through the years. And it will be through Grassroots and Underground efforts and not the Sites like DU/Daily Kos and the Blogosphere Pundits that thrived in the Bush Years. It will be something new...and not tied into the Media we helped build...that sadly just wasn't enough once we threw all our efforts behind Obama and were left with just being cheerleaders for whatever came next.
Something NEW will come. It can't come soon enough, imho.. But, it might take sorting out Hillary and Jeb before we get to the point where something NEW can get some traction. 
just my humble opinion of watching this all this since Windows 95 opened the gate for the Masses of us to be able to communicate with each other in huge numbers of old, middle and young who were not all that Computer Savvy but could now find a way to use the first Personal Computers with Browsers, E-Mail and the rest.
The Internet Explosion that took off with Stolen Election 2000 followed by "9/11" and the Iraq Invasion. Building the Grass Roots...we did and the Blogosphere that took out traditional established Newspapers and Magazines and made Information for the Masses available on the Internet.
NOW we transition as Ads and Click Bait takes over the Internet...and move somewhere else?