That was a terrific editorial. This part really resonated with me.
Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop.
I think you give the Republican way way too much credit for being able to put together much less execute a sophisticated strategy like play rope-a-dope. The reaction against identify politics is visceral and is pretty much universal among all types of Republicans, as well as some older Democrats.
One of the primary focus of my Pearl Harbor organization is education. In particular helping teacher educate students on WWII. In reviewing some of our programs, I was astonished to look at high school textbook on the WWII. One of the top ones had a side bar on the Japanese internment, another on on Woman in WWII, a third on blacks in WWII and the Tuskegee airmen, a fourth on the dropping of the atomic bombs and survivor stories. Now the sidebars were pretty well done for the most part. The problem several of the sidebars were the length of the main article on WWII. The main article had a couple of sentences about Pearl Harbor, Midway, a paragraph on D-Day, a few sentences about island hoping and finally the end of the war. The problem isn’t this identity stories aren’t important, it is that the bigger story gets lost. To the point where after doing some testing, we found most students couldn’t correctly identify who fought on the allies or the axis.
If America is going to become the land of the hyphenated Americans; African-American, Gay-American, than White-American is going to be the biggest group.
She won the popular vote which means more American’s voted for her than anyone else. She didn’t ignore an entire group, that group just heard what they wanted to hear from someone else and didn’t care if it was the truth or not.
Could be, but the German system actually turns out engineers and the like; they define engineering a bit differently, maybe, but these are white-collar jobs via the apprenticeship programs at least. There are blue-collar jobs too but increasingly “blue collar” means running a computerized manufacturing system.
Apparently, ~50% of Americans (and a similar percentage of Japanese) don’t know that Japan fought against the US in WWII. It’s mostly because our postwar relations have been so consistent that it’s hard to imagine the other being an enemy.
While I feel Trump is an abomination, Clinton’s fault lay in her focus on how terrible and unfit he was as a person, instead of focusing entirely on the issues. She would have crushed him there.
Even strategically, it makes sense on its face: its tempting to attack him for being a horrible person, but America has established that they don’t care how horrible a person Trump is, so that just a non starter in terms of attacking him. It’s virtually guaranteed that his policies will be terrible though, so attack on those and reveal how he’s unfit to be President not just because of his temperament, but because of his childlike understanding of, say, foreign policy.
I agree totally. I’m trained as a historian, and I think that what is happening is that on one level people making text books there’s an assumption that the basics are somehow covered (where I have no idea) and therefore the sidebars are appropriately sized and scoped. But no one is teaching the “basics,” too often, so that no one gets the fact that fifty million people died to stop fascism from spreading over the globe, that sixteen million Americans were in uniform, most of them drafted, in support of this struggle, and that the nation pulled itself out of the Depression and fought the war and then built the post-war world. There’s tons of room there for the story of all Americans of all stripes, but it has to be an American tale.
Easy target there. “Where’s the plan?” She could get an old lady to make the tv spots like the old Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” commercials and they’d have gone seriously viral. The fate of the free world apparently depends on such things. I’m going to find a volcano to jump in now.
Someone who also had her same ability to craft powerful ads and get them on the air, same ability to deal with Trump in the debates, same clear experience advantage, etc. There are so many factors that go into who a candidate is and how a campaign unfolds, it’s impossible to say what it would have looked like at the end. She lost, she was attacked along specific angles, therefore anyone who wasn’t vulnerable to those attacks would have won? Only if that person was literally her in every other respect do we have any reason to believe that.
This is very similar to the kind of civil service it seemed like Obama was angling towards when he campaigned. If it’s truly a government employment, though, I think the attitude will be to attack it as an expansion of government power. You could outsource the employment to corporations, though…
I like the idea, although you’d be getting into a weird hybrid. It’s kind of like using the government as a temp service, and those already cause enough HR headaches without politics involved.
Americorps outsources a lot to civic orgs- you could have them direct and determine who they need. I’d put special emphasis on trying to make diversity by taking rural whites and making them work on city projects and vice versa as hidden sauce if I could.
As a previous Americorps member, part of the challenge with that program is you have to be able to live with less than minimum wage, we’re talking about 5.00 an hour when I was on it, and the program also relies on SNAP. Lastly, it largely pulls from groups that are largely already aware of certain issues…for example, you don’t see a lot of people with Business, Finance, or Science type degrees. You see a fair amount of individuals from the Social Sciences.
I’m all for pushing individuals into various services though. It’s a great option, but I’m pretty sure the push would be seen a liberal agenda initiative not a help the community approach.
I’ve been meaning to come back to this for some time - sorry for the necro, and I think you are being very generous as I could easily add another 50-100 more things. The democrats can’t seem to go a week without inventing a new cause they want to support and go after businesses for more tax to pay for it or vote for something that puts a small group at a disadvantage (smoker’s tax, bear & cougar hunting restrictions, etc).
I can’t speak for other states other than Oregon, but as the democrats have such a stranglehold on the state, I’m bombarded with this constant search to give out more money to some fringe group and take from some other group.
For example, the vast majority of libraries get funded through bond measures, knowing that people would fund this. This year, we saw the Oregon lottery proceeds that was created for economic impact get partitioned out to not one but 3 other fringe things - just as they have siphoned off the lottery since its inception.
I really wish they would just fund the core things a government should fund and then have everything else be a bond measure that needs to be voted on & funded every 4 years or so.
You grossly misrepresent OR as a state. I noticed you didn’t mention Measure 97 which was rejected by Democrats and Republicans alike. The driver’s licenses for illegals attempt, also voted out, Measure 88 in case you forgot. But don’t let me get in the way of your rant.
All were approved. They all siphon money from lottery proceeds which were originally intended for economic development.
I’m not here to argue whether they are good measures or not, but they are taking funds from an existing program (which I abhor and can be left for another rant for another day) and is an example of how the democrats constantly find new programs to start up and they fund these by siphoning funds from existing areas.
They can not seem to prioritize anything. They just add more to the list.
Because you make it sound like Oregon is heavily democratic and you can just go down Strollen’s list and check it off as all affirmations in Oregon. The fact is the state of Oregon is only tilted Democratically. It’s not a swing state but the Republican presence here is heavy. For Christ’s sake we had a Republican Senator for years. Go ahead and bitch about policies you don’t like, but don’t kid yourself; those are passing with Oregonian Republican support.
Oregon Portion of Lottery Proceeds for Support of Veterans, Measure 96 (2016)
Approved Yes 1,592,326 83.74%
No 309,171 16.26%
I mean seriously look at that measure. You think that’s just Democrats? Hell, can you Republicans take responsibility for anything?
