Forum Overview :: Balance of Power
 
Failed scare tactics by skip 10/19/2016, 4:47pm PDT
There have been so many this election that I desperately try to avoid learning about more but this little screed by The Intercept made the rounds and I'm puzzled what exactly anyone can be outraged by. They acquired some recordings of Clinton discussing Sanders and his supporters and try to frame it as some savage attack.

CLINTON: It is important to recognize what’s going on in this election. Everybody who’s ever been in an election that I’m aware of is quite bewildered because there is a strain of, on the one hand, the kind of populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory kind of approach that we hear too much of from the Republican candidates. And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel. So as a friend of mine said the other day, I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don’t have much company there. Because it is difficult when you’re running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is — I don’t want to overpromise. I don’t want to tell people things that I know we cannot do.


FACT: We don't have the social programs of Scandinavia
FACT: Most voters who believe in that stuff have no idea what it means or how much it would cost or how to pay for it other than some vague notion that it should be "the rich" defined as the people who earn more than them

CLINTON: Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future. I met with a group of young black millennials today and you know one of the young women said, “You know, none of us feel that we have the job that we should have gotten out of college. And we don’t believe the job market is going to give us much of a chance.” So that is a mindset that is really affecting their politics. And so if you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing. So I think we should all be really understanding of that and should try to do the best we can not to be, you know, a wet blanket on idealism. We want people to be idealistic. We want them to set big goals. But to take what we can achieve now and try to present them as bigger goals.


Again, The Intercept tries to portray this as some Sanders attack. It's not. People overestimate what the president can do and underestimate Congress or how much compromise is necessary for any change. Three quarters of Millennials can't even name one Senator and most Americans don't know the branches of the government let alone how it works so it's not surprising that they don't get this. A lot of tedious and boring work goes into setting laws and most of it is by those no-name legislators. Most of what the president does is foreign relations or trying to test their executive power by orders (see Obama's illegal immigration plan which seriously overreached) and nominating SCOTUS justices. Pelosi and/or Reid will probably be setting most of the Congressional agenda if the Dems do take control of Congress. The only people who could be offended by this are 4channers who really do live in their mother's basements and were never going to vote for her anyway.
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Failed scare tactics by skip 10/19/2016, 4:47pm PDT NEW
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