It's been nearly a month since the Inaugural Edition of Hillary News & Views, so I won't waste any more time with a lengthy introduction!
(Please note that within all excerpts, Clinton's own words can be found in bold.)
Hillary's only a few days away from rolling out her economic policies, but for now, she's focusing heavily on the two biggest challenges that our nation must confront in the aftermath of the Charleston terrorist attack: race and guns.
The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart reported on her visit to St. Louis with his piece, "The Republican Party needs to catch up with Hillary Clinton on race."
Clinton spoke with an honesty I have not heard from a white politician since her husband President Clinton tried to lead a national “conversation about race” in the late 1990s.
And our problem is not all kooks and Klansman. It’s also in the cruel joke that goes unchallenged. It’s in the off-hand comments about not wanting “those people” in the neighborhood.
Let’s be honest: For a lot of well-meaning, open-minded white people, the sight of a young black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear. And news reports about poverty and crime and discrimination evoke sympathy, even empathy, but too rarely do they spur us to action or prompt us to question our own assumptions and privilege.
We can’t hide from any of these hard truths about race and justice in America. We have to name them and own them and then change them.
Clinton’s willingness to go all-in on race at this point of the presidential campaign stands in stark contrast to the dodging on the Republican side. Questions about race in general and the Confederate battle flag in particular have left the GOP tied up in knots. To be fair, the Democratic Party has had a decades-long head start in grappling with and understanding the myriad issues and nuances involved in talking about race. But after watching heartbreaking videos from Staten Island and Cleveland, McKinney, Tex., and North Charleston, silence is not an option.
Anyone who wants to be seriously considered for president of the United States must take race and racism seriously. He must be ready to discuss both with the thoughtfulness they require and be ready to offer solutions that can be implemented. I say “He” because the only viable woman in the race for the White House already has it covered.
More on race, guns, gay rights, and other topics after the fold.
Clinton continues to claim the moral high ground on race, and doesn't mind pointing out who is standing far below her, calling out the racist rhetoric of a leading (!) presidential candidate but not bothering to pretend he's an outlier that doesn't represent his party:
“We have to have a candid national conversation about race and about discrimination, prejudice, hatred,” Clinton said in an interview with KNPB’s Jon Ralston. “But unfortunately, the public discourse is sometimes hotter and more negative than it should be, which can, in my opinion, trigger people who are less than stable.”
“For example,” the former secretary of state added, “a recent entry into the Republican presidential campaign said some very inflammatory things about Mexicans. Everybody should stand up and say that’s not acceptable. You don’t talk like that on talk radio. You don’t talk like that on the kind of political campaigns.”
“You can name him,” Ralston responded, but Clinton refused to use Trump’s name.
“I think he is emblematic,” she said. “I want people to understand it’s not about him, it’s about everybody.”
Clinton's
impassioned speech to the U.S. Mayor's Conference garnered a lot of press for her discussion on "hard truths about race", but she also signaled that she'd be focusing on the other element that made the Charleston massacre possible:
For me and many others, one immediate response was to ask how it could be possible that we as a nation still allow guns to fall into the hands of people whose hearts are filled with hate.
You can’t watch massacre after massacre and not come to the conclusion that, as President Obama said, we must tackle this challenge with urgency and conviction.
Now, I lived in Arkansas and I represented Upstate New York. I know that gun ownership is part of the fabric of a lot of law-abiding communities.
But I also know that we can have common sense gun reforms that keep weapons out of the hands of criminals and the violently unstable, while respecting responsible gun owners.
What I hope with all of my heart is that we work together to make this debate less polarized, less inflamed by ideology, more informed by evidence, so we can sit down across the table, across the aisle from one another, and find ways to keep our communities safe while protecting constitutional rights.
It makes no sense that bipartisan legislation to require universal background checks would fail in Congress, despite overwhelming public support.
It makes no sense that we wouldn’t come together to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, or people suffering from mental illnesses, even people on the terrorist watch list. That doesn’t make sense, and it is a rebuke to this nation we love and care about.
The President is right: The politics on this issue have been poisoned. But we can’t give up. The stakes are too high. The costs are too dear.
Campaigning in New Hampshire this weekend, she
signaled a continued focus on guns:
“We have to take on the gun lobby one more time,” said Clinton, speaking without notes or a teleprompter in front of a crowd of about 850 Dartmouth students and native Granite Staters. “The majority of gun owners support universal background checks, and we have to work very hard to muster the public opinion to convince Congress that’s what they should vote for.”
She said it was the “height of irresponsibility not to talk about it."
For yet another election cycle, some of the most insightful and witty commentary is from Melissa McEwan, founder of the feminist progressive blog Shakesville.
For my money, she wrote the very best piece responding to Clinton's campaign kickoff speech. Here's what she liked the most:
That she took an intersectional view of the gendered pay gap.
That she said talent is universal but opportunity is not.
That she mentioned mass incarceration.
That "women, immigrants, and gays" were not all lumped together in a single mention as part of the "special interests portion of this speech," like we have seen from so many Democratic candidates before, but that she mentioned people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, people with disabilities, and women (not mutually exclusive groups) multiple times in meaningful ways.
That she said: "They shame and blame women, rather than respect our right to make our own reproductive health decisions!" Our.
That she made jokes about herself, and made reference to the sustained personal attacks she's weathered over her long career, and that she said she has and will make mistakes.
I have mixed feelings about that last one. Part of me is all: Of course it's the female candidate who feels obliged to note she isn't perfect. And part of me is all: Fucking hell, I really like hearing a presidential candidate say flat-out that they don't know everything and don't have all the answers.
Also, in the
most recent edition of
Primarily Speaking, McEwan's essential daily posts on the primary candidates of both of parties, she captured the latent sexism of that Politico profile on Huma Abedin:
In other other news, Politico did a profile of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's longtime key aide Huma Abedin, and it is predictably terrible! Here is something that would simply never be written about two male colleagues: "Just a few feet away from Clinton dressed in a classic tweed navy shift, Huma Abedin, 39, moved through the crowd tracking her boss. Abedin, Clinton's longest-serving aide, chatted breezily with acquaintances. But like a mother monitoring her child on the playground, she never let Clinton drift out of her line of sight, ever vigilant and poised to act."
It's simply terrific how "like a mother monitoring her child on the playground" manages to demean both women at once.
With the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage nationwide, a renewed focus has been placed on Clinton's record at State. The latest round of e-mails released from her tenure there led to this piece from the Huffington Post:
Behind The Scenes Of Hillary Clinton's Push For LGBT Rights At The State Department.
In May 2009, just months into her new position as secretary of State, Hillary Clinton took a major step toward changing the way the agency treats its employees: She announced that gay diplomats would receive benefits similar to those received by their heterosexual counterparts, which they had previously been denied.
Over her next four years at the State Department, Clinton continued to push for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality both in Foggy Bottom and around the world. Her emails, some of which were released this week by the State Department, show that she and her top advisers were looking for ways to move forward on the issue...
Clinton's most notable moment on LGBT issues perhaps came on Dec. 6, 2011, when she gave a historic speech in Switzerland in which she declared, "Like being a woman, like being a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights."
"Until that time, there had been, historically, very little focus on the serious human rights abuses directed toward LGBT people globally, even among some of our allies," said Socarides. "She was the first person to say that this is an important thing and that we should focus on it."
The rise of anti-gay initiatives globally had been on Clinton's radar for some time, and emails show that she and her team were looking for ways to address them.
A recent Facebook post went viral. It was of
a young boy who wrote, "I'm homosexual and I'm afraid about what my future will be and that people won't like me."
Clinton responded to him with her own post on Facebook:
Prediction from a grown-up: Your future is going to be amazing. You will surprise yourself with what you're capable of and the incredible things you go on to do. Find the people who love and believe in you - there will be lots of them. –H
One more sentimental note to close out this News Roundup, courtesy of a dad who thinks a female president will be a good thing for our sons, too. Here's an excerpt from Bill Burton's piece for the Sacramento Bee,
"Legoland, Hillary and teachable moments."
On the way to Legoland, my 4-year-old son sent a wave of horror through this liberal father when he described the heroine of “The Lego Movie” by saying, “She’s really good at fighting and getting bad guys, even though she’s a girl.”
I collected myself. Didn’t drive off the road. And from this moment of crisis (and opportunity), I did what any good progressive would and turned the conversation to Hillary Clinton.
Obviously.
That same day, Hillary concluded her campaign kick-off speech by talking about building an America in which a father should be able to tell his daughter that she can be anything she wants to be, including president of the United States.
I couldn’t hope for that more. But as the dad of a curious and precocious boy, I also can say that Hillary Clinton’s election would mean an extraordinary amount to my son. He and his peers all need to know that anyone can truly do anything in this country
I recommended reading
the whole thing. It's a bit of a tearjerker!
Now, there's no way to do one of these things and fit everything in, especially when you wait too long to do them.
Here are some articles worth checking out that didn't make the roundup:
CNN Politics: Clinton goes after a Bush in New Hampshire
The Boston Globe: From Clinton, a multi-generational message in N.H.
Time: Hillary Clinton Hopeful for an Iran Deal Next Week
Politico: Hillary Wins Again. It'll Take More than These E-mails to Knock her Out
Buzzfeed: Hillary Clinton Hires the Strategist who Broke her 2008 Campaign
Forbes: Hillary's Race For 2016: Turning Followers Into Votes
Time: What Hillary Clinton Learned from this 2013 Campaign
Time: Inside Hillary Clinton's Grassroots Campaign
Denver Post: Hillary Clinton's Everyday Feminism
Crossposted at Hillary HQ