W.J. Astore
Hillary Clinton is a deeply compromised candidate. She and her husband have made over $125 million in paid speeches since 2001, including $30 million in 16 months. There’s nothing wrong with making lots of money: this is America, after all. But there’s something wrong about accepting big checks from powerful banks and investment houses and then positioning yourself as the champion of “everyday people” in your run for the presidency.
Along with her close alliance with Wall Street, Hillary is essentially a neo-conservative on foreign policy who admires the Real Politik of men like Henry Kissinger. She promises more interventionism overseas and doubtless more wars. She is especially close to Israel and advertises herself as a loyal ally to Benjamin Netanyahu.
The person she most closely resembles in recent U.S. politics is Richard Nixon. Like Nixon, she’s aggressive in foreign policy (recall her infamous quip about the fall of Qaddafi in Libya: “We came, we saw, he died”). Like Nixon, she is secretive and economical with the truth, despite her truth-telling vows. Like Nixon, she is a complex person, not without talent, but a person who often doesn’t appear fully comfortable, especially when pressed about her record. Like Nixon, she leaves very little to chance; there’s calculation to nearly everything she does.
A Hillary Clinton administration promises to be even less transparent than Obama’s. It would be more in service to the powers that be (big money donors such as the health care industry will come calling for their payback, and they’ll get it). Despite protestations of being “progressive,” a Clinton administration promises to be regressive in terms of peace, social progress, and fairness for the working classes.
Despite this, her path to the presidency seems remarkably clear. Bernie Sanders, an honest man of conviction, lacks establishment support. Hillary’s Republican opponent of the moment, Donald Trump, is an opportunistic business tycoon who apparently says whatever pops into his head. Trump may be the one candidate with more negative baggage than Hillary.
A Hillary/Trump matchup this fall promises lots of drama, but it’s a lose/lose scenario for anyone looking for real progressive change.
Bracing Views 
There are few leaders who would publicly embrace Kissinger as Hillary did. This says that either she has not been paying attention or she does not care.
It also needs to be said that if the African American community’s support of HRC is what gets her the Democratic nomination, it may add to the racial divisiveness on the left.
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“Bernie Sanders, an honest man of conviction, lacks establishment support.”
… which is why this great nation of ours NEEDS the kind of “anti-establishment” (not the Trumpian version) grass-roots, democratic, get out the vote, come together for a common good without prejudice, and wage peace not war revolution … that Sanders proposes: change from the top down
Am I the only one who, more and more, thinks of Donald Trump as Donald Sutherland’s Presidential character in Hunger Games … while Hillary shouts “Andmay the odds ever be in your favor” to all of us
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Well said. Hillary will be the nominee and, as soon as she is safely nominated, will veer sharply to the right.
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Yes, but You-Know-Her and her corporate/pundit supporters will call her predictable rightward lurch “moving to the center,” as if the center lies even further to the right than Bubba Bill and Barack Obama have moved the Democratic Party, not to mention the country. The Democrats’ decades-long move rightward from the right, has displaced the Republicans from their normal right-wing positions and pushed them practically off the right-hand margin of the political map.
Ironically, with no politics left of right remaining in the United States, Donald Trump has instinctively felt the pull of a political vacuum in the real center of the country. He has made a few fledgling moves leftward as a consequence, and if he takes only a few more, he could find himself closer to the center of the country than any Democratic politician seems capable of recognizing. You-Know-Her and her venal-Valkryie politics may prove the death of more than just the Democratic Party.
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