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‘putin didn’t cause the democratic party’s collapse’..

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(excerpt..)

progressives must learn the real lessons of 2016.

Of all the strategic blunders made by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign the most consequential — apart from neglecting the Rust Belt states — may have been the campaign’s ill-advised decision to portray Donald Trump as an outlier in the GOP who did not represent true Republican values.

In the early stages of her campaign Clinton went out of her way to defend the Grand Old Party’s reputation and highlight some of the conservative critiques of Trump – so as to emphasize her opponent’s uniquely ‘deplorable’ nature.
The Democratic candidate even tried courting ‘Never Trump’ conservatives at one point and featured Republicans in a series of TV commercials endorsing her over Trump:

‘I thought I would be able to support whoever the Republican candidate was.

I always have’ reflected a Republican woman in one ad.

‘But with Trump on the ballot I just can’t.

He does not hold my values or the values of the party’.

While promoting conservative critiques Clinton also eagerly touted endorsements from top Republican figures including neoconservatives like Robert Kagan – Max Boot – James Kirchick and David Frum – who were particularly supportive of Clinton over the isolationist Trump.

In the end of course this effort backfired spectacularly.

It did more to alienate progressives and boost Trump’s underdog status than it did to attract moderate Republican voters — in no small part because ‘moderate Republicans’ no longer exist.

While progressive critics had warned of this happening throughout the campaign Clinton and her surrogates often seemed more comfortable with courting disaffected Republicans than reaching out to left-wingers and working-class voters.

(cont..)

Source: To win, the anti-Trump resistance must learn from the Clinton campaign’s mistakes – Salon.com

‘will the trumpian nightmare lead to a real ‘political revolution’..? (+ op-ed.. andrew little is our hillary clinton – promising/delivering not much..) 

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Slavoj Žižek argued Trump would be better for the left than Clinton — and if we survive this he might be right.

(ed: i have sympathies for/am in agreement with this ‘it has to get worse before it gets better’ argument/thesis..

while i dreaded trump winning – my sense of dread was only slightly less at the the prospect of clinton winning..

and here in new zealand i can’t see the election of little/the neoliberal-incrementalist labour party as making any real/significant changes for the better..

..just more of that same neoliberal-bullshit – andrew little is our clinton..

tell me how he isn’t..?..)

(excerpt..)

Last November, the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek turned a lot of heads when he announced shortly before the 2016 presidential election that if he were American he would vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton — not because he thought Trump was the lesser evil but precisely because he was the greater evil.

The Slovenian intellectual’s hope was that the election of a vulgar right-wing extremist like Trump would ‘be a kind of big awakening’ that would trigger ‘new political processes’ in America.
In other words – with a reactionary demagogue as transparently abhorrent and dangerous as Trump in the White House a popular movement on the left would emerge to challenge not only Trump’s reactionary populism but the neoliberal status quo that had long prevailed in Washington.
Clinton – argued Žižek – stood for an ‘absolute inertia’ that would stifle a populist movement on the left and while there was great danger in a Trump presidency there was also great danger in electing Clinton — especially in the long run.
(cont..)

Source: Out of darkness, light: Will the Trumpian nightmare lead to a real “political revolution” after all? – Salon.com

julian assange praises trump and ‘blasts clinton’..

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Leading up to the election, Julian Assange used his whistleblowing website to publish a cascade of emails connected to the Democratic party and the Clinton campaign.

WikiLeaks founder said there are opportunities for the US to change under the Trump administration – ‘change for the worse and change for the better’

(excerpt..)

Julian Assange the founder of WikiLeaks has offered guarded praise of Donald Trump – arguing the president-elect ‘is not a DC insider’ and could mean an opportunity for positive as well as negative change in the US.

Assange described his feelings about the US election results in an interview as ‘mixed’ before going on to sharply criticize Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and providing a more ambivalent assessment of Trump’s ascent to the White House.

‘Hillary Clinton’s election would have been a consolidation of power in the existing ruling class of the United States’ Assange told the Italian newspaper la Repubblica.

‘Donald Trump is not a DC insider – he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities’.

He added: ‘They do not by themselves form an existing structure so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilising the pre-existing central power network within DC.

It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better.”

In the week leading up to the election Assange used his whistleblowing website to publish a cascade of emails connected to the Democratic party and the Clinton campaign.

(cont..)

Source: Julian Assange gives guarded praise of Trump and blasts Clinton in interview | Media | The Guardian

clinton in denial: blames putin for her defeat..

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Given the long U.S. history of overseas intervention – Putin’s election hack could be seen as historical payback.

(excerpt..)

Former CIA acting director Michael Morell – another Clinton partisan – ratcheted the moral outrage several notches higher –  describing the intelligence agency’s assertion that Russia meddled in the U.S. presidential election to help Donald Trump ‘the political equivalent of 9/11’.

Nowhere in the mix of after-action Clinton reflection is the reality that Trump carried a third of the 700 counties that President Obama carried in 2008 and 2012.

In states like Iowa Michigan Wisconsin and Pennsylvania where this happened there has been no real economic recovery.

As documented by the Center for American Progress a prolonged foreclosure crisis was still depressing home values in those places.

Even in defeat the Clinton forces remain oblivious to the motivations of voters who had voted for Obama twice but felt that after eight years they were worse off and voted for Trump.

But the Clinton deflection is only part of the problem with the current debate over allegations that Russia covertly tried to influence the outcome of our elections.

Depicting the United States as a hapless victim of the ruthless Russian cyber-bear is ahistorical – and ignores the decades when the U.S. did similar things and worse all around the world.

The FBI and CIA have a long track record of covertly manipulating politics both here and abroad and much of it remains classified to this day.

While the Clintonistas may want a full disclosure of the FBI’s internal process involving her private email server – I am still holding out for the long-promised declassification of all the JFK assassination files.

(cont..)

Source: Russia messed with our election! America would never do anything like that, right? – Salon.com

joe biden ‘regrets every day’ that he didn’t run..

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The vice president mused about Hillary Clinton and the future of the party in a new interview with the LA Times.

(excerpt..)

Like his boss President Obama Biden believes a large part of the blame for Clinton’s defeat rests with the party not making it clear that it cared about the concerns of ordinary Americans.
‘I believe that we were not letting an awful lot of people — high school-educated – mostly Caucasian – but also people of color — know that we understood their problems’ Biden said.
He also warned against ‘a bit of elitism that’s crept in’ to the party he has served on the national level for 44 years.
‘What are the arguments we’re hearing? ‘Well, we’ve got to be more progressive.’
I’m not saying we should be less progressive’ Biden said.
‘We should be proud of where the hell we are and not yield an inch’.
He added though that ‘you can’t eat equality’.
Biden’s decision not to run for president in 2016 — which he announced in October 2015 — may have been one of the most consequential choices of the election – as he was widely perceived as the strongest possible challenger to Clinton.
Although he told Connecticut NBC affiliate WVIT in January that ‘I regret it every day’ that he chose not to run – he added at the time that it was the best decision for his family.
(cont..)

Source: Joe Biden worries about the “bit of elitism that’s crept in” the Democratic party – Salon.com