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“A Winning Theme”: Clinton’s America Never Stopped Being Great

Sometimes, you take your laughs where you find them. For me, the funniest moment in an otherwise dreary and intermittently scary election year came when Candidate Trump visited the old state fairgrounds in Little Rock. A character seemingly straight out of a Charles Portis novel provided the most incisive commentary.

The author of “True Grit” is the state’s best novelist, a master of deadpan comedy in a tone-perfect Arkansas twang.

According to the newspaper, a Trump supporter carrying a “Make America Great Again” sign encountered a young man on his way into the arena to bask in the Great Braggart’s eerie orange glow.

“America’s already great, you dumb-butt!” the kid said.

He could have been Portis’s Norwood Pratt, the would-be country singer traveling the country with Joann the Wonder Hen, the College Educated Chicken. An ex-Marine, Norwood wasn’t one to mince words.

So there was Hillary Clinton on the night of her thunderous win over Sen. Bernie Sanders in the South Carolina primary.

“We don’t need to make America great again,” she said. “America never stopped being great. But we do need to make America whole again. Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers. We need to show by everything we are in this together.”

Ain’t that the truth? Maybe not in Trump World, where voters who never tire of proclaiming their holiness are voting for an aging playboy who brags about the married women he’s seduced. (In his book The Art of the Deal.) But he’s going to put Them back in their place, isn’t he?

Yeah, well, good luck with that.

Anyway, I suspect Hillary has found a winning theme.

Meanwhile, pundits seem oddly reluctant to say so, but Bernie’s candidacy imploded due to a classic political blunder when he accused his opponent of pandering to African-American voters by supporting President Obama.

“Hillary Clinton now is trying to embrace the president as closely as she possibly can. Everything the president does is wonderful. She loves the president, he loves her and all that stuff,” Sanders said sarcastically. “And we know what that’s about. That’s trying to win support from the African-American community, where the president is enormously popular.”

Never mind that she was Obama’s Secretary of State. Bernie delivered these remarks in an interview with BET’s Marc Lamont Hill on February 18. His poll numbers have plummeted like a stone ever since.

In early February, Gallup reported that Sanders’ net favorable rating stood at 57 percent to Clinton’s 44. By the March 1 “Super Tuesday” primaries, those numbers were reversed. Bernie dropped thirteen points as Clinton rose.

I wouldn’t presume to speak for black voters, but they tend to be very acute about being patronized. Indeed, 81 percent of Democrats generally have a favorable opinion of President Obama, along with a reported 97 percent of black voters in South Carolina.

Sanders’ remarks weren’t merely insulting, but tone deaf and objectively dumb. As South Carolina’s Rep. Jim Clyburn put it, “I don’t know how you can look at Mrs. Clinton’s history—she was not running for president in the 1970s when she came to South Carolina to work with those African-American juvenile detainees or juvenile inmates trying to better their conditions, when she went to work with Marian Wright Edelman, a native of Bennettsville, South Carolina, to come down here working with her trying to better the lives of children…So, what was she doing? Who was she pandering to back then?”

Not Barack Obama, Clyburn noted, who was in junior high school.

But then the Sanders campaign’s idea of a South Carolina surrogate was Princeton professor and controversialist Cornell West, author of this immortal trope:

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. It’s understandable,” West said. “As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white…When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.”

Nothing scarier than a Princeton revolutionary.

West recently suggested that civil rights icons Clyburn and Rep. John Lewis had sold out to Wall Street.

“Tell you what,” President Obama might have responded if he were a character in a Portis novel, “don’t pee on my shoes and tell me it’s raining.”

As the results of this foolishness became manifest, some Sanders supporters began suggesting it was wrong for “red state” voters to have so much to say about the Democratic nomination.

Only Yankees need apply.

“Given the reality of a Republican presidential primary where the candidates are racing to outdo each other in their contempt for people of color…” Nancy LeTourneau writes in Washington Monthly, “is it any surprise that African Americans would assume that this country is facing the threat of a confederate insurgency?”

No surprise at all.

 

By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, March 2, 2016

March 3, 2016 Posted by | Bernie Sanders, Black Voters, Hillary Clinton, Mainstream Media | , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

“Charity Is Not A Substitute For Justice”: Paul Ryan Still Doesn’t Understand The Scale Of The Poverty Problem

Earlier today, House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) continued his study of poverty with a hearing entitled, “A Progress Report on the War on Poverty: Lessons from the Frontlines.” Featuring witnesses from several poverty-fighting non-profits, Rep. Ryan styled the hearing as a “listening exercise” to hear about the strategies these charities and non-profits use to help alleviate poverty on the local level.

While it is admirable that Rep. Ryan gave a platform for community leaders to share their stories, he seems to have no sense of the scale of the problem before him. Indeed, Rep. Ryan’s veneration for the work of private charity is quite the contrast with his opinion of the federal government’s anti-poverty programs, which he has disparaged as “duplicative,” “complex,” and “ineffective.” However, for as much good work as it does, private philanthropy has well-known biases, as charitable donations tend to flow disproportionately to more glamorous causes, and often dry up during business cycle downturns—just when they’re needed most. In short, while individual charities and non-profits do incredible work to help our communities, they lack the ability to create widespread change; only the federal government has the resources to help alleviate poverty at the scale that is required.

While all of the witnesses who appeared at the hearing—including, ironically, both witnesses called by the Republican majority—represent organizations that receive federal funding, only one of the witnesses, Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, used her time to point out the importance of government programs. She cited a 2013 Columbia University study that found that government programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC); Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps); the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program (WIC); and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) reduce poverty by approximately 40 percent. Kathleen Short of the U.S. Census Bureau has also performed research on this topic, finding that government programs such as WIC, SNAP, and EITC, among others, all had a significant impact on reducing the poverty rate. In addition, Feeding America estimates that private charities make up just 4 percent of all food assistance resources in the U.S., with federal programs such as SNAP comprising the other 96 percent.

But it seems that Rep. Ryan doesn’t understand the unique role only the government can play in helping lift citizens out of poverty, as his recent FY15 budget proposal cuts billions from poverty-fighting programs, as Matthew Yglesias over at Vox recently pointed out. We also analyzed the proposed Ryan budget and projected that, if enacted, Rep. Ryan’s huge cuts would have a negative impact on economic growth and cost the labor force millions of jobs.

If Paul Ryan truly wanted to help the poor, he would not just rely on local leaders and private charities to reduce poverty in our country; instead, he would propose a budget that supports social safety nets and poverty-fighting programs.  He would support increasing the minimum wage, which would give 27.8 million Americans a raise and help the parents of one in five children.  And he would vote to extend Emergency Unemployment Insurance, which would help unemployed Americans in our weak labor market and even generate jobs.

Marian Wright Edelman got things right during the hearing when she said that “all of our charity is not a substitute for justice and a fair allocation of public resources.” Unfortunately, the House majority seems to think that publicly-funded programs must be ineffective just because they are publicly-funded—despite all evidence to the contrary.

 

By: John Smith and Alyssa Davis, Economic Policy Institute, April 30, 2014

 

May 3, 2014 Posted by | Paul Ryan, Poor and Low Income, Poverty | , , , , | Leave a comment

   

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