Episode #49 of Waking Up, The Lesser Evil is perhaps the best post-election failure dissection conducted pre-election that you will ever find. Listening to them discuss the compromised nature of Hillary Clinton; how they (the Clintons) claimed to be defenders of equal rights while doing so many things that make that a lie:
What I draw from the episode is this: Clearly there are more people interested in making sure other people suffer more than they do. That there are far more people who think gays do not deserve equality, that poor people need to be poorer, that immigrants are parasites, that American success comes at the cost of a subjugated world, all the things that Donald Trump was verbally in support of during the campaign. Clearly there are far more of those people than the thinking men in this and other podcasts thought.
All of this makes the Clintons look like the smart ones after all. Clearly Hillary was pulled too far to the left to win her base (Southern moderate conservatives) forcing her to make appeals on the left that were never going to win anyway. They were never going to win, because those people would not support her and thought they were stronger than they were. Thought they were strong enough to defeat the stormtrumpers.
Had that other candidate appeared (and it wasn’t Bernie Sanders) been allowed to appear by opening up Democratic politics after 2008, who knows where we would be now. Would we still be waking from Birther-in-Chief nightmares? That we will never know. Maybe the US will survive two years so we can see a new Democratic party emerge. One that isn’t lead by such compromised people.
Postscript
Looking back one year later, I have to modify my voiced perceptions. I thought then she had gone too far left. I’m thinking today that she actually went exactly where she should have been on the political spectrum, but failed to communicate her positions to the right people to gain enough support in the right places.
This is more a function of the corruption of the US election system than it is anything that can be blamed on Hillary. The corruption of money in politics, party interference including gerrymandering and voter suppression, and even the electoral college itself. Sullivan, being a conservative, thinks Clinton lost touch with her base and went too far in the wrong direction. The key demographic that she needed, white women, were never going to vote for her in enough numbers to make up the difference needed without the suppressed votes in states like Wisconsin. GOP corruption of the system combined with targeted conservative funding and foreign interference put us on this path to destruction much more than anything Hillary ever did aside from having been seen destroying the reputations of Bill Clinton’s sexual victims.
