Hillary is not the essential problem. Electing an alpha female is a big deal, but not the solution to anything. What is?
There are three kinds of politics: issues, money, and elections. None is more important than the others. You can vote for politicians on election day, or by contributing time or money to campaigns, but you can vote on issues every day by becoming informed, by writing, by discussing, and by how you spend your money.
Policy is about issues: what people already want, but we can only get collectively. It is also about what we know about how to deal with the issues, if we win enough elections. Elections are about organizing and candidates and money and letting the public know that you care about their issues, and have a plan to implement the needed policies.
Let me repeat that. Politics is about what people already want, not what you wish they wanted. It is also about the elections we are actually having, not the ones we wish we could have, and about the candidates actually running, not the ones you wish we could get, or you wish could win in the current toxic environment. Sometimes it is about taking the toxins out of the environment when others are telling you that toxins are good for you.
So where does that leave us? And Hillary? I'm glad you asked.
(This Diary began as a comment in Want to pull Hillary Clinton to the left? Win back Congress)
Eleanor Roosevelt (and others before her) pointed out that higher-order political thinking is about ideas; the midrange is about events; and the bottom level is about people.
So let's put aside the people: Hillary vs. the Clown Car Express to Nowhere. She can clobber any of them, and every possible primary opponent besides. Feel free to argue about that in other Diaries like the one mentioned above. We have other tofu to fry. (Mmm. Fried tofu with mushrooms and ginger and Yorkshire pudding on the side. Have I mentioned my stints as cook in Zen monasteries lately?)
Let's put aside the Israeli elections and ISIS and poison gas (again!) in Syria and Republican political stunts in Congress and political scandals and non-scandals and melting glaciers and rising oceans and the rest of the events of the day, also. They won't go anywhere while we consider more important matters, specifically getting to the point where we can address them all effectively at the same time.
Ideas are where the action is. Policy is where a party stands, or better yet where it is evolving to, seeking out issues (as police shootings and local government pillage and plunder of minority communities emerged in this last year) and solutions.
Democrats have plenty of issues and policies where the problems are well known and solutions are sitting on shelves because too many of those who pass as Democrats do not know how to, or even want to win or even contest elections. We know pretty much what we want on immigration, LGBT rights, union rights, Global Warming, gun safety, Palestinian statehood, protection of women and girls, women's reproductive and economic rights, jobs, infrastructure, and many other issues.
Not only that, but the public agrees with us by substantial margins on all of those I listed. We know a fair amount about ways to deal with income inequality, certainly enough to start moving on. We do not know, at this point, how to get unlimited dark money out of politics, but we know, and the public agrees, that that is essential. (Disclosure would at least mean we would be fighting unlimited well-lit money, so that we could campaign against the motives of such funders, as we do now against the Kochs.) We could talk about single payer health care if we had majorities in Congress.
You could look at the 200+ bills that got through Nancy Pelosi's House in 2009-2010 only to be killed by the filibuster in the Senate. We can probably nuke the filibuster on legislation the next time we get control, and pass improved versions of all of those bills. Hillary would sign them. Any Democratic President would do most of that immediately given any sort of chance.
Hillary will do in foreign policy a lot of what she did as Secretary of State. Could be worse. There will still be too many wars where we fight the symptoms but not the diseases, but not one with Iran on top of the rest. She will be too friendly to Wall Street. (Obama was too friendly to torturers, refusing to have them even investigated, and to Wall Street, bailing out banks but not mortgage holders. Then there was his dreaded All of the Above energy policy.) She will not cut taxes and regulation for corporations and the 1% on her own. That will only if we cannot take the Senate and if we lose even bigger in the House. See Bill and the repeal of Glass-Steagal just in time for the Tech Bubble.
Republicans put in place a well-organized, well-funded strategy to take as many state legislatures and governorships as possible in 2010, and then to gerrymander every state they could, and put in as much voter suppression as they could think of, and to go after women, minorities, LGBTs, schoolchildren, union workers, and others while slashing taxes and regulations. It has only gotten worse since then.
Gerrymandering means that Democrats need better than a +5% supermajority nationwide, or that much extra turnout, in order to win the House again, plus enough legislatures to start undoing the gerrymanders in 2020. We have that margin in public opinion. How do we get it at the ballot box on election day, in every race and on every question? Organizations like Battleground Texas, the New Georgia Project, and many others think they have the answer: continuous GOTV. The best endorsement of that idea comes from Republicans freaking out over the prospect of US citizens actually voting.
So the actual issue that stands before all other issues is a new Voting Rights Act to create a new, SCOTUS-proof preclearance list; outlaw partisan gerrymandering; and outlaw every known form of voter suppression. We could talk about what Oregon has just done, registering people to vote by default, so that non-voters would have to opt out. We could require states to issue ID to citizens, again by default, not by individual effort. We could make election day a national holiday. We could make voting mandatory, by mail. You have heard such ideas. There are plenty more of them.
Just one decent voting bill would make all of those others on all of our other issues possible. Whatever your personal #1 priority issue is, voting rights is how you get it done. Let's talk about how to get that bill, and fix the SCOTUS at the earliest opportunity while we are at it.
Now go forth and make Hillary and the Democratic Party organizations and the candidates in your districts and cities and counties and states campaign on it. Don't try to pick and choose among all of the other actual issues. Ask voters what they want, and explain that we want to do that, and we will as soon as we can fix voting. But until then we need Democrats to vote, and GOTV, as never before.
My sig applies as much to Hillary as to Republicans.