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Today’s Hillary News & Views open with a powerful op-ed about the ongoing fight for equality in America.
Hillary Clinton writes for CNN:
We've all read the stories about small businesses -- pizzerias, bakeries, florists -- that discriminate against LGBT customers. A woman in Florida named Dana told me about the extreme discrimination she faced at her workplace. Eventually, it got so bad she quit. Today, she's sleeping on the floor of her father's apartment.
There are still clerks who refuse to do their jobs and issue marriage licenses to LGBT couples. And in far too many places in America, it remains legal for people to be fired solely on the basis of who they are or whom they love.
So the stakes in this election are high. And even if we do prevail against the open bigotry of Donald Trump, we'll still have our work cut out for us.
We need to pass the
Equality Act, to ensure full federal equality for LGBT Americans.
We need to continue to fight discrimination at all levels of government and in all 50 states, as I did at the State Department, where we strengthened the department's policies on anti-discrimination, worked with global advocates and other stakeholders in encouraging countries to decriminalize same-sex relationships and supported policies that extended benefits and additional protections to LGBT individuals.
And we need to tackle the intersectional pressures that make life even harder for many of our fellow human beings. In particular, acts of violence against transgender women of color continue to be reported at an alarming rate. It's an emergency, and we need to treat it like one.
This issue is important to me. As secretary of state, I fought to make it possible for transgender Americans to have their true identities reflected on their passports.
And as president, I'll fight for the rights of transgender people, because no one should be harmed or mistreated for being who they are.
Catch that use of the word intersectional? It’s the key to her resounding primary victory and a clear reflection of how diversity on her campaign leadership team has shaped her message and her policies. Love it!
I knew that Clinton won California in 2008, but I wasn’t aware that it was Obama who led the polling average there, and that Clinton outperformed that polling average by nine points!
FiveThirtyEight reports:
Clinton has done well in heavily Hispanic areas. So far, 17 majority-Hispanic districts have voted in the Democratic campaign: 10 congressional districts in Arizona, Florida, Illinois and New York, and seven state Senate districts in Texas (which tabulates its vote based on state Senate boundaries rather than congressional boundaries). Of those 17 districts, Clinton has won 16. In fact, she’s dominated them, winning an average of 66 percent of the vote to Sanders’s 34 percent. The lone, weird exception is Chicago’s earmuff-shaped 4th Congressional District, where Sanders won by 16 percentage points.4
Exit polls also show some evidence of Clinton’s strong performance with Hispanics, although with some inconsistencies. They had her winning Hispanics by more than 40 percentage points in Florida and Texas and by nearly 30 points in New York, although narrowly losing them in Nevada and Illinois. In California, by contrast, recent polls do not show Clinton performing especially well with Hispanics. Instead, they have her winning them by about 7 percentage points, on average, similar to her overall lead on Sanders.
The Hispanic vote is not monolithic; Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and other groups all vote somewhat differently from one another. Age can matter a lot: Clinton performs well among older Hispanics while Sanders does well among younger ones.5 The predominantly Spanish-speaking Hispanic population can vote differently from the English-speaking Hispanic population. All of this can make it dangerous to extrapolate results from one state to another. But it also makes it tricky for the polls, which often have small sample sizes for ethnic subgroups and trouble reaching a representative sample of Hispanic voters. To add to the complication, California also has a significant Asian-American population, and we have very little evidence about how Asian-Americans are voting this year.
So while the polls could be off by enough for Sanders to win California — I like his odds better than our polling model does — they could also be off in the other direction, meaning that Clinton could win by 15 to 20 percentage points. In 2008, Clinton significantly outperformed her polls in California, in part by winning the Hispanic vote 2-to-1 over Barack Obama.
Whatever the outcome, it’s almost certainly too late to help Sanders win the nomination; he’d need to win every remaining state by roughly 35 percentage points to catch up to Clinton in pledged delegates. But California may tell us something about whether Hispanic Democrats are already standing with Clinton, or whether she’ll have some outreach to do to ensure they turn out for her in November.
With the primary ending this upcoming Tuesday, Clinton is gearing up to start fundraising for the general election in earnest.
Politico reports:
With Hillary Clinton poised to become the presumptive Democratic nominee next Tuesday, her campaign is preparing to begin actively soliciting general election funds for the first time on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with her campaign’s planning.
The move will amount to a potentially massive and immediate infusion of cash into Clinton's campaign, which announced this week that it had more than $42 million cash-on-hand as of the end of May.
The decision to begin collecting general election funds, which Clinton has actively avoided for more than year, is yet another sign that even as Bernie Sanders remains in the Democratic race, Clinton is turning her attention fully to taking on Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee. She delivered a blistering speech in San Diego on Thursday warning that his election would be a “historic mistake.”
In addition to raising general election funds starting on Wednesday, Clinton also will raise money for the Democratic National Convention to be held in July in Philadelphia, according to the person familiar with her campaign’s plans.
Since he has become the presumptive Republican nominee, Trump has struck an agreement with the Republican National Committee and a dozen state parties to begin raising funds for them. But unlike Clinton, who has three decades of donor contacts, Trump is largely starting from scratch in the donor world.
Trump could still prove a formidable force among small donors — his campaign collected more than $10 million, mostly selling merchandise, including his signature “Make America Great Again” hats through April — but his campaign has yet to build a formal structure to cultivate such contributors. Clinton has raised more than $40 million in contributions from small donors giving under $200.
Not too much to report on the primary race this weekend, a race that will end three days from now.
But Clinton’s transition to the general election isn’t sitting well with the rival she’s leaving behind, and he’s responding with his typical grace and dignity.
Melissa McEwan writes for Blue Nation Review:
Bernie has said, repeatedly, that he’s not going to help a rightwing Republican get elected; that he will “do everything [he] can” to prevent a Donald Trump presidency.
But in response to Hillary unleashing a fierce and fiery and important attack on Donald’s reckless foreign policy proposals, unapologetic bigotry, and wretched temperament, Bernie doesn’t back her up. He doesn’t unleash his own equally devastating assault on the reckless and contemptible Trump. No. He goes after Hillary.
He accuses her of not “thinking through the consequences” of the intervention in Libya. Now, I had a number of foreign policy disagreements with Team Obama-Clinton over their shared tenure, but never once would I have suggested that they hadn’t thought long and hard about the decisions they made. That is the primary reason I support both of them as strongly as I do: I trust that they came to their decisions in good faith, prioritizing diplomacy and regarding military intervention as a last resort, and, most crucially, after careful and sensitive deliberations.
The suggestion that Hillary doesn’t consider consequences of her decisions is one of the most absurd—and, frankly, nasty—accusations I have heard in a long time.
And he again brings up her Iraq vote, which—setting aside the not insignificant detail that it was not a direct vote for war—she has herself said she got wrong: “As the war dragged on, with every letter I sent to a family in New York who had lost a son or daughter, a father or mother, my mistake [became] more painful. I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple.”
It’s one thing to bring up a mistake someone’s made when they refuse to acknowledge the mistake. When someone has said they got something wrong, and speaks publicly about how painful it was to reckon with getting it wrong, beating them over the head with it doesn’t actually serve any decent or meaningful purpose.
Especially not when there’s no reason, none, to invoke that error except to hurt that person. Bernie has lost the primary. The only worthwhile thing he can do at this point is parlay his new-found (though waning) influence into defeating Donald Trump.
Our own Aphra Behn writes for Shakesville:
I also get that there are Sanders supporters who are profoundly, deeply, gut-wrenchingly disappointed, even angry, that he is not going to clinch the nomination. I also get that there are people who feel they cannot vote for the Democrats, or for Hillary Clinton, for a variety of reasons, some of which are extremely compelling indeed. But generally speaking, I don't expect the Sanders campaign to hand-pick delegates who say they can't support the candidate of the party whose nomination he's been trying to win.
For the Sanders campaign to be encouraging this kind of Trump-enabling bullshit is not only troubling to me, it is terrifying. I do not make historical comparisons lightly, as readers of this space well know. But when people who are old enough to remember the 1930s tell me that Trump's rallies remind them of speeches from a Mussolini or a Hitler, I listen.
When Trump talks about Hispanic Americans as criminals and as less than human, I also listen. When he talks about the Muslim American community as if they are a grave and pressing danger to national security, I pay attention. When he openly abets and encourages violence against women of all races, against male minorities, when he mocks people with disabilities, when he speaks casually of the war crimes he plans, I think about all of the hateful 20th and 21st century dictators, from all around the world, whose rhetoric Trump gleefully echoes.
I get the issue of disappointment and I daresay Hillary Clinton does too. With a much closer margin of votes, she competed with Barack Obama in 2008 until June. Then, on June 7, 2008, she delivered one of the most gracious, and perhaps most important concession speeches in United States history. She began the movement for unity in early June, more than two months before the late August convention. During the convention, she released her delegates and moved to nominate Obama by acclamation. Because it was that important to beat the Republicans and to elect our first African-American President.
And Donald Trump makes John McCain look reasonable, maybe even downright charming, by comparison.
Bernie Sanders, take note. Run this thing to the convention if you want to. But remember the stakes. Write it on your hand. Tape it to the mirror. Repeat after me:
Stop the Trump. Stop the Trump. Stop the Trump.
Clinton’s speech decimating Donald Trump continues to draw rave reviews. I haven’t seen this much positive press for her since the one-two punch of the Benghazi Hearing and the first debate.
Matthew Yglesias writes for Vox:
The essence of the argument is simple. You may not agree with everything she says or everything she's done or will do, but you can at least be sure that a Clinton presidency won't lead to some enormous unforeseen cataclysm. With Trump, there's no such guarantee.
"There’s no risk of people losing their lives if you blow up a golf course deal," she said. "But it doesn’t work like that in world affairs. Just like being interviewed on the same episode of 60 Minutes as Putin is not the same as actually dealing with Putin."
Bottom line: "The stakes in global statecraft are infinitely higher and more complex than in the world of luxury hotels."
Over the course of the past year, Clinton has been talking primarily to Democratic Party primary voters. This argument — and this speech in general — is not one that will be especially appealing to them.
What she's offering instead is an argument aimed at a much broader audience. It's an argument that acknowledges, implicitly, that there are tens of millions of right-of-center Americans who've never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate but didn't support Trump in the primary. Clinton is pitching an argument aimed at those people — one designed to offer little ideological or policy content in hopes of appealing to 70 percent of the population rather than 51 percent.
This is the best argument to use if Clinton wants to persuade right-of-center voters to cross the aisle and vote for her, stay home, or take a look at Gary Johnson and the Libertarian Party.
But it's not an argument that's going to warm the hearts of liberals. Pursuing the argument that Trump is simply too risky to serve as president requires Clinton to try to denude the campaign of as much ideological content as possible. Any talk from her side about the big issues and ideas in politics necessarily reminds people that for any given set of big issues and ideas, not everyone is going to agree. By contrast, pretty much anyone can be open to the basic idea that Trump is a loose cannon who doesn't know much about foreign policy.
Some progressives fear that this kind of campaign means Clinton won't build a mandate for progressive policy if she wins the election.
The reality, however, is that the biggest objective determinant of how a Clinton administration governs is what happens in November's congressional elections. Clinton is aiming for a landslide, and if she can deliver one, it will set the stage for a lot of progressive policy — whether or not she talks about it on the campaign trail.
Fred Kaplan writes for Slate:
For those who thought Hillary Clinton needed proxies or a running mate to attack Donald Trump with the savagery required of a long-slog campaign, her Thursday speech in San Diego should be a mind-changer.
The all-but-inevitable Democratic nominee showed that she’s fit to be her own attack dog, mauling her ill-matched Republican foe to shreds without getting muddy in the process.
The audience gasped at hearing “bizarre,” tittered at “personal feuds,” and burst into laughter and applause at “very thin skin.” They hadn’t heard any presidential candidate talk like this—they certainly hadn’t heard Clinton talk like this. It was a full takedown of Trump, but in an anti-Trump manner, spoken not in vague adolescent epithets (“stupid,” “idiotic,” “crooked,” “goofy”), but in an itemized checklist of his utter, almost laughable unsuitability for the job.
She flung forth the entire litany of his shortcomings: his proposals to default on the national debt (treating the economy “like one of his casinos”), his pronouncement that he knows more about ISIS than the generals, his advocacy of torture and of murdering the relatives of suspected terrorists, his demonization of Muslims (“playing right into the hands of ISIS”), his dismissiveness toward America’s allies and their importance to U.S. security, his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal (“Donald Trump doesn’t know the first thing about Iran or its nuclear program—ask him; it will become very clear, very quickly”), his persistent mockery and nastiness (“He has no sense of what it takes to deal with multiple countries with competing interests and reaching a solution that everyone can get behind”), his paucity of ideas about how to solve the world’s real problems (“He doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about”).
On each point, she contrasted his flimsy prejudices not only with her own experience and thought-out views but also with the long-standing, bipartisan traditions of American diplomacy.
Then she kicked Trump in the shins. Pointing to his claims that “the world is laughing at us,” she scoffed, “He’s been saying this for decades. He bought full-page ads in newspapers across America back in 1987, when Ronald Reagan was president, saying America lacked a backbone and the world was laughing at us. He was wrong then, and he’s wrong now. And you’ve got to wonder why somebody who has so little confidence in America—and has felt that way for at least 30 years—wants to be our president.”
Bette Midler managed to say the same thing within the character limit of Twitter:
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Crossposted at HillaryHQ, an independent, progressive blog committed to the electing Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States.