so far she has been content to let these republican nut jobs duke it out
Sure. it makes tactical sense, for one. But, more importantly, she has realized that the campaign she wanted to run won't win. Quietly be a power broker for Wall Street, and publicly running on her accomplishments and leadership skills isn't the winning formula she, and no doubt her advisors, thought it was going to be. She has totally missed the growing desire for populism and kicking over the apple carts of the Beltway.
How she missed it, I don't know. Must be an inside the Beltway thing. The first sign was the fall off in voter participation, showing that more and more people were becoming disaffected from the process. Except for some rumblings, there was no real push for action until the 1990s. Newt and his merry crew of pirates managed to ride the first wave of the discontent. Unfortunately, their policies just made things worse for the disaffected, not better. The reign of Bush the Lesser just brought on more pain. The collapse of the economy was the final straw. The rise of the Tea Party was fueled by the discontent, but they were co-opted almost immediately by members of the Right who had been trying to start up something like it for a decade. It also fueled the 2008 election, but Obama got side-tracked by his pragmatism and desire to work with the existing power structures. The Occupy movement was another expression, but they didn't really know what they wanted and wound up being stomped out pretty brutally.
Now we have dissent popping up all over the place. Trump is tapping into some of it. The #BlackLivesMatter movement got a start with Michael Brown, but it has shown no signs of slowing down. The America Feels the Bern movement is yet another sign. Especially his appeal to working class whites.
The problem is that Hillary is a policy wonk. That is where her passion is. Hate to say it, but what is needed is someone more like her husband. That person could win. By acknowledging that a lot of people have grievances and that we can work together to address them as a country instead of just a special interest group.
It is dicey, though. Populist movements have a lot of power and are capable of triggering massive changes. Revolutionary ones. They are singularities in that there is no predicting where they go. Right now, we could wind up with some particularly nasty outcomes.
But something needs to be done. It is sort of like the San Andreas fault. Sooner or later it is going to pop. And once the avalanche starts, it is too late for the pebbles to vote... |
