“We are at our best … when we have each other’s back”
by Tom Sullivan
It’s all Hillary Clinton all the time in the news this morning and, you can be sure, on the Sunday bobblehead shows later this morning. I was on the road yesterday, so I’m just catching Clinton’s Roosevelt Island speech on C-Span.
There’s no lack of snark. Politico calls the speech “the expected proto-State of the Union stuff.” But that’s not an unfair description.
Digby mentioned that Clinton’s line yesterday about not being a quitter is what makes her admired by those who respect her and frustrates those on the right who have spent a generation trying to knock her down. Like the those she asked yesterday to champion, she refuses to be knocked out. It was for that (not for any affiliation with Margaret Thatcher’s policies) that I suggested she is the Democrats’ Iron Lady. Weakness is the cardinal sin for the alpha dogs of the right, and something they try hard to pin on every Democratic candidate. With Hillary Clinton? Good luck with that.
John Nichols called the speech “short on populist specifics.” He calls for Clinton to go “all in,” as FDR did much earlier than the Four Freedoms speech Clinton’s Four Fights speech was meant to echo. Roosevelt went all in against “economic royalists.”
“There are two ways of viewing the Government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” Roosevelt explained. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776.”
Roosevelt called out the party of “trickle down” before the phrase existed, a phrase that drew strong boos when Clinton did the same yesterday. And indeed, most of the Tories — Royalists by temperament — did not leave the country after the Treaty of Paris, as I have noted here and at Scrutiny Hooligans:
Do you stand with the modern-day British East India Corporations and their masters (the Kochs, the Olins, the Bradleys and other royals that want to unmake the American Century and rig American democracy like they rigged the financial markets)? Or do you stand with the people in your community? Who do you serve?
It’s pretty clear who Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP leadership in Wisconsin serves. They and their brethren and industry ghost-written legislation in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana — in about half the states. To strip the collective bargaining rights of political enemies, to defund public schools (and teachers), to suppress the vote by requiring photo IDs (Jim Crow, Jr.), to dissolve elected local governments in a corporate coup d’état, to arrogate sweeping executive authority over state agencies in a single unelected … tzar(?), to transfer tax dollars from the poor and middle class to give tax breaks to corporations, the works — all supported by the same press-shy billionaire ideologues behind Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council. As the fake “Koch” phone call demonstrated, they don’t care about your jobs or your economy, and they don’t care about you.
I’m thinking that is more of what Nichols would like to hear from Hillary Clinton. So would I.
But she got my attention with this line:
We Americans may differ, bicker, stumble, and fall; but we are at our best when we pick each other up, when we have each other’s back.
The right is defined by whose backs they’ve got and whose they don’t. It never ceases to amaze me how they give lip service to the military’s esprit de corps as what is best about America. Leave no man behind is a code of honor. For many on the right, that spirit ends at the post fence line. It is only for those they deem deserving. Only for the few, the proud, the well-connected, those sharing their ideology and faith. In the civilian world, you’re on your own. That selective view of Americanism is what Clinton needs to speak to if she wants to win.