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The Dangerous Self-Delusions of Some Hillary Supporters

06 Tuesday Sep 2016

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As we’re in the home stretch (fucking finally) of the 2016 election cycle, and Hillary Clinton is now the official nominee, there are some trends that I’ve been seeing for a long while that, in the big picture, are kinda scary, and I wanted to talk about.

First the obvious:  In the abstract, it is absolutely amazing we finally have a woman at the top of a Presidential ticket.  Women are woefully, absurdly under-represented in the public sector (outside of folks working as administrative assistants, I would imagine), and it is far past time we had a woman at the top of the ballot.  And I think the excitement among many women generated by her candidacy is pretty damn understandable.

Still in abstract mode:  It’s good we have a qualified candidate on our ticket.  No matter what you think of her, Clinton has been involved in politics for a long, long time, had an intimate look at how a Presidential administration works, and has accumulated some good legislative and diplomatic experience since Bill left office.  No matter what the right-wing nut jobs (RWNJ) say, this lady is qualified.

Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, Hillary Clinton is a terribly-flawed candidate, something that caused me to vote for someone else in 2008, and made me lament this election season, “Does it have to be this woman?”  Even more unfortunately, expressing that kind of thought has been, if not exactly dangerous, a good path to get inundated with charges of sexism and misogyny.  Pointing out her very real non-progressive policy problems doesn’t seem to help; if you were for Bernie against Hillary, you must be a sexist, patriarchical pig (in some quarters).

But now I’m seeing some genuine delusional thinking among Hillary supporters, and it’s kind of scaring me.  It’s scaring me for Hillary, because she might actually lose to Trump and, despite my dislike of her as a candidate, she is so much better than him it’s scarcely worth talking about why.  But I’m also worried that by allowing themselves (and this includes the folks inside the campaign) to continue on with these delusions, they’re going to endanger a very real chance of taking over the Senate or House.

There are two main delusions working here:

She is being unfairly treated by the press, but once people “really” get to know her (or “once she gets her message out”) they’ll see she’s great.

And the response to this is a simple negative: No.  No they won’t.  Hillary has been in the national public eye for more than a quarter-century, and a plethora of polls show that people have made up their mind about her.  Another huge set of polls show her negatives are higher than her positives; ignoring Trump, she is the most widely disliked candidate to ever run for President since polling started.

Lots of people hate Hillary, everyone has made up their minds, and that’s not going to change for many people, if any.

And the dangerous delusion is that this will change.  That people will actually give a shit about her “official policies”, or listen to her speeches, or be convinced by the endless articles about how unfairly treated she is by the press.  Or by going to her rallies.  Or by anything.  People’s minds are made up, and the best thing her folks can do is work hard to get people to the polls.  Not just to save us from Trump, but for the down-ballot folks who can benefit from a higher turnout.  Higher turnout, Dems win.  It’s that simple.  And this leads us to the second, even scarier delusion:

There’s no ‘enthusiasm gap’.

Again, a simple response is available: Yeah, there is.  It’s very real, and there’s been a ton of polls and articles that support this.

This delusion was displayed in stark terms today with dueling columns in the New York Times, where Paul Krugman pooh-poohed the idea there’s an enthusiasm gap (with a pointer to an article by Michelle Goldberg from April, aeons ago in political time), and another article talking about how Millenial black women are indeed very unenthusiastic about Hillary’s candidacy.

I’m a very leftist Progressive, one who has advocated for GLBT equal rights for decades, who believes we need single-payer healthcare, who thinks the government needs to stop financing monogamy, etc. etc.  Hillary is a New Democrat Apparatchik who is a war hawk (Henry Kissinger, FFS!), has close ties to Wall St., and has followed her husband’s trailblazing path by not just ignoring her base, but (with encouragement from the Beltway press) actively and publicly scorning them and their policies.  That she has now paid us lip service by including some of our policies in the party platform is nothing but window dressing, given no one really pays attention to the party platform after an election.  (Note none of this has anything to do with her gender.)

One might argue I’m an outlier.  But in addition to the Bernie folks, you’ve got plenty of Progressives who distrust Hillary because of her defense policies, her Wall St. ties, and other issues where previously (as a Senator or Secretary of State or even early in the campaign) she said and did one thing, and then (mostly after leftward pressure from Bernie) she changed her tune, or seemed to.

There are also more than a few people with Clinton Fatigue.  Almost all these folks  are well aware she is treated unfairly by the press, that her reputation for lying/sneakiness/whatever is something the RWNJ press has been hammering into the public consciousness for decades.  And they don’t care.  They’re sick of hearing about Benghazi, emails, Vince Foster, lame jokes about Monica, and on and on and on.  And the only way they’re going to be relieved of that fatigue is by the Clintons stepping away from public life.  So you can imagine that looking forward to another 4-8 years of Clinton nonsense feels these folks (and yes, I’m one of them) not with excitement, but a fatal combination of dread and ennui.  These are the people who saw her lose in 2008 and breathed a sigh of relief.  One that was premature, as it turned out.

This is a group that includes people like my mom, whose feminist cred dates to the early 70s and indoctrinating her son with Ms. Magazine and Our Bodies, Our Selves.  My good bi friend who actually worked with Hillary in the mid-90s.  My wildly progressive friend in Portland.  My ex-gf, who applied to be a Bernie delegate at the convention.  And on and on.  This is anecdotal, of course it is, but it’s backed up by plenty of polling data.

But Paul Krugman and other Hillary boosters seem to want to deny this is an issue.  They have a double-barreled strategy:  1) There is no enthusiasm problem, and 2) Even if there were, what are those whiny progressives going to do about it anyway?  Vote Trump!  Ha ha ha ha ha!

It’s a problem.  And not just for Hillary, but for the down-ballot folks so important to getting any of the progressive agenda into the conversation.

Personally I don’t understand Hillary’s whole candidacy.  We found out from the whole DNC/Debbie Wasserman-Schulz debacle that what most progressives suspected was true: “The Establishment” had put their thumbs on the scale in favor of Hillary.  But why?  Aside from her high negatives, she has a terrible relationship with the press, is a desperately boring (or annoying, depending on who you ask) speaker, scorns her base, and has negative numbers that strongly suggest winning would be a very difficult, uphill battle.  Why did everyone decide she needed what amounted to a coronation rather than a primary season?  Why did so many other, very qualified women (Elizabeth Warren leaps to mind) decide to stay out of the race?  Hell, why did so many men decide to stay out?  WtF kind of party decides even before the primary season that there’s basically only going to be one candidate?  What the hell?

And The Democratic Establishment wonders why so many of the “rank and file”, so many of the progressives, so many of the millennials, so many African-Americans, so many college-educated men, weren’t all immediately sold on the Hillary narrative.  Why people keep saying their out of touch.  Well, duh!

So I hope to God the Hillary boosters’ delusions are either popped (though I see no evidence that’s going to happen any time soon), or it ends up not making a difference because Trump is so awful he drives people away and into voting for Hillary and the other Democrats.

I hope.

Election “Year” “Reporting”

21 Saturday Mar 2015

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“The boys on the bus”, image courtesy of NPR

Yes, I put both “Year” and “Reporting” in scare quotes.  Know why?  Because something that starts two years (at least) before election day is not a “year”, and because the “reporting” the reporters do from the campaign trail doesn’t qualify as true reporting, in my opinion.  Maybe “election season gossip” would be closer to the mark. 

Which is the main fact behind my whole point.

There are a couple of really irritating aspects to election reporting that I think about often, especially during election season (and especially during Presidential election season).  The first irritating thing, the reasons behind which are easy to understand, is that the vast majority of election reporting are “reports” on “the horse race”, i.e. who is up, who is down, who is moving up, etc. in the polls.  Nothing about people’s positions, who might actually make a better office-holder, what a given candidate might do in a particular situation or facing a certain vote based on their past behavior (or past votes), or hell even what their past behavior has been.  No, it’s all breathless discussions of “the polling”.  (And equally breathless discussion about how shallow modern political discourse has become in that we only discuss “the horse race”.  Which is kinda absurd, since my memory goes back to the Nixon years, and I don’t remember a whole lot of reporting on the issues back then, either.)

The reason for this is simple:  That kind of writing is easy.  I can sit here, right now, make up some poll numbers and write a story about it.  Seriously.  It’s absurdly simple, the only research it requires is looking up poll numbers, and it can easily fulfill your word quota (or minute quota) of the day.  And everything is reported in this box. It’s not “How would Candidate Jones’ statement on Israel effect his future Israel policies”; no, it’s “How does Candidate Jones’ gaffe about Israel effect his polling?”  Writing all your stories according to a pre-existing narrative is way easier than coming up with something original.  It’s like writing a new fantasy story based in Middle Earth or Westeros instead of coming up with your own fantasy world.  It’s lame, reductionist, a cop-out of your responsibilities, but it’s easy and understandable.

What I don’t understand is:  Why is there a pool of reporters traveling with each candidate at all?

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in the last, oh, say 20 years of Presidential elections, it’s that reporters and commentators are constantly talking about how useless and news-less campaign events and speeches are, how little access they have to candidates, what a pointless exercise campaign reporting seems to be.  Expect these stories to start flooding in soon; New York Magazine got off an early salvo–the proximate cause for this blog post–just last week (20 months before election day!).  And as I read all the whining in this post, and anticipated all the whining to come in the next 20 months, I kept thinking, as John Oliver would say, “Why is this still a thing?”

One would think that reason enough to do something about campaign reporting.  But we have been hearing about–and observing–for nearly two decades now the vast shrinkage in “traditional media”.  Newspapers folding or being “consolidated”, network TV ratings dropping like rocks (along with their budgets), magazines going out of business or migrating to the Web, etc.  Money is tight in media.  They’re closing overseas bureaus all the time.  And so I get back to my John Oliver question:

Why is campaign pool reporting still a thing?

Cover campaigns, absolutely.  And I can understand why the Washington Post, New York Times, and a few other papers and TV organizations with national reach cover them.  But do CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, ABC, Bloomberg, and God alone only knows how many other networks really all need individual reporters on the ground for every candidate for every event?  Do we need reporters from the Des Moines paper going to New Hampshire in December of 2015?  You get the picture.

What I don’t understand is, with every network and paper crying pauper, why are they still doing this?  Why don’t they designate one or two people to follow these people around–particularly the right-wing nitwits who have absolutely no chance of winning–and leave it at that?  They can share their “news” with the other outlets, and write their feather-weight “news” pieces from that.  Or they can just stay home, look at the poll numbers, and write the exact same stories.  But either way, sending dozens of reporters howling after this election season’s Herman Caine is absolutely idiotic.

That’s what I think, anyway.  How about you?

Obamacare Sucks (but Not For the Reason You Think)

05 Monday Aug 2013

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You really think the government is worse than insurance companies?
(Image courtesy of CrazyColtrane)

Obamacare sucks.  But it’s not for the reasons you think.

Us lefties have been screaming “socialized medicine!” for as long as I can remember. Literally. And folks on the right continue to insist that “the market is better!” and “If we have socialized medicine, care will be rationed!”

You know what, righties? Care is already rationed.  It’s just that right now, it’s rationed based on what insurance companies–not doctors–think is reasonable treatment for you, and how much money you can spend.  So if you think having your care rationed by some bureaucrat at an insurance company whose goal under a capitalist system is profit–this is not a value judgement on my part; that’s what the goal of all companies is under capitalism–then you should be perfectly happy.  If you trust a government bureaucrat who, although often incompetent and slow is theoretically working for you and not to make more profits, then you should be screaming “socialized medicine!” (or “Medicare for all!”) just like us looney lefties.

And this is why Obamacare sucks.  NOT because it’s a giant government takeover of the healthcare system.  God, I wish that was the case.  No, it’s because it puts profit-seeking insurance companies between you and your health care.  And the incentive for profit-seeking insurance companies is to take in as much of your money in premiums as they can, and pay out as little as possible (i.e., limit the amount of health care you receive to the absolute bare minimum).  Again:  This is not a value judgement.  This is simply how companies work under a capitalist system.  The problem here is obvious:  Having profit-seeking companies between you and your health care is obviously a Bad Thing.

Now, Tea Partiers want you to believe that having the government between you and your health care is worse.  But I believe that, while it can be bloated and inefficient and often uncaring, the government is worthy of trust more than some mercenary insurance company.  At least it’s not the governments job to take as much of your money as possible; that is the job of businesses, and insurance companies are businesses.

Here’s just one example of what I mean:

I have chronic neck pain. I’m in pain basically all the time. Working with a pain care specialist, I have managed to reduce the level of pain.  One of the things that has helped enormously is regular chiropractic visits.  However, my insurance company has a “hard limit” of 10 visits per year to the chiropractor.  Ten.  Per year.  I need to see him about once a week.  So the insurance only pays for 20% of the visits I need, and even when they “pay”, my “co-pay” is actually $60 of the total $90 charge for the visit.  Doing the math, that means that the insurance pays for 7% of the health care that my doctor has said is critical, and that has been shown to be effective.  7%.

Don’t tell me that isn’t rationing care, you right-wing jerks; the awesome free-market that you love so much is paying for seven fucking percent of the care I need.  And if I don’t get that care, I’m in agonizing fucking pain.

So you’re right in a way: Obamacare sucks.  But the reason it sucks is because it puts a for-profit industry whose goal is to provide me with as little care as possible in between me and my health care.  And that does indeed suck.

Medicare for all.  The sooner the better; my neck really hurts.