Why Hillary Should Avoid Progressives
by Jeffrey McNeil
When I turned on my television set New Year’s day, I witnessed something that has caused me great grief. It was seeing the two politicians I most admire, Bill and Hillary Clinton at New York’s City Hall commemorating the inauguration of self professed Marxist and former Castro supporter Bill De Blasio.
In attendance was the 86-year-old activist Harry Belafonte, who even at his advanced age can still race-bait with the best of them. He opened the ceremonies with a classic “Down with Whitey” speech by comparing the Koch Brothers to the Klu Klux Klan and denouncing the outgoing mayor’s police force. Then there was radical feminist and legal aid lawyer Letitia James ranting about how the how the rich were taking from everyone and urging the new mayor to spend more of the people’s money for social programs. Bill Clinton tried to bring some sanity with a moderate message and even showed Gotham city's greatest mayor Michael Bloomberg some respect. But his call for moderation left the crowd in stunned silence.
My fears about the incoming mayor were confirmed when he finally spoke . His speech was straight out of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
It was classic big spending rhetoric of promising everything but demanding little from those that believe that government is the cure all for everything. Behind each phrase he whipped the idealistic left into a frenzy, chanting “We won’t wait, we’ll do it now.”
Luckily for New Yorkers they won't have to worry too much about De Blasio’s Cuban vision for New York . Despite New York’s reputation for being a bastion of liberalism, possible presidential candidate Andrew Cuomo and the state legislators will do the responsible thing and put his big spending agenda on ice.
While I believe Andrew Cuomo will put the brakes on Deblasio, I am still puzzled why Hillary Clinton would risk her good name pandering to the fringes of the Democratic party.
I believe she is worried because the left-wing media particularly Slate magazine and Msnbc have been pumping up the fantasy that Elizabeth Warren can be president, when in reality she is another big spending liberal who will get pulverized in a general election.
Truth is, what happens in the northeast should stay in the northeast. Outside of New York no one's interested in a big spending agenda. The last big spender to win the nomination from the Northeast was John Kerry and he couldn't handle a lightweight such as George Bush. The realities are that a Northeast candidate hasn't won the presidency since John F. Kennedy, and he ran a conservative campaign.
If I was advising Hillary, I would be low key and wait. Americans are fed up with both parties and are tired of the extremism of both ends of the aisle. Right now Chris Christie is positioning himself as the voice of reason .
I worry that if Bill DeBlasio’s big spending ideas fail and they will, her association him will come back to haunt her. In her zest to pander to progressives she is alienating the center and paving the way for Chris Christie.
Because of the the president's reluctance to stand up against the fringes of his party, America is in a foul mood. The politics of redistribution always leads to landslide victory for Republicans.
As the mid terms roll around, the American public is in no mood for more tax and big spending programs that liberals envision and are poised to get ran out of office.
My suggestion to Hillary is to let the Warren/ DeBlasio wing take the party off the cliff for I believe a Democratic shellacking will be good for the party when 2016 comes around. A complete route of liberalism would end the fantasy that Elizabeth Warren can be president and allow Hillary to run a more centrist campaign.
In the end she shouldn't make the middle nervous by embracing big spenders like Bill DeBlasio.
Again, thought-provoking takes, Jeff. You express your opinions well, but I think that we can do better than to reinforce rigid ideological divides.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure you're with the majority of Americans who think that child labor should remain illegal and that children should have universal, publically-available primary education.
I'm also pretty sure you support the idea that those with the least money should spend a smaller proportion of their limited savings in tax. And that those with larger reserves should contribute to the public good in a larger proportion.
But what if I told you that all of those ideas were (then-extremist) positions advanced by Marx in the Communist Manifesto?
Violence is no solution to social problems, and Lenin's/Stalin's/Castro's interpretations of Marx are dire failures. And sure, the abolition of private real estate and inheritance are extreme ideas that have proven sure-busts. But talking about Marx like he was Hitler may be damning some of your own social morality.
Every one of Newton's laws has subsequently been debunked. But his thinking put us on the road to the future. Sure a lot of Marx's ideas were utopian and/or heavy-handed. But maybe re-read some Dickens, compare that world to today's, and ask if the social-welfare policies championed by Marx have improved our world. I don't want to re-live the 1800s, the glory days of "laissez faire" economics.
And since the "free markets" of those times were largely fed by overseas slave labor, I hope you can maybe re-think your derision of many formerly-enslaved peoples who are inherently mistrustful of ideas that want to take us back to that time.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete