Hillary Doesn’t Get It

Hillary Clinton formally linked arms with the DLC last week when she agreed to direct the group’s one-year project to define a new Democratic message and agenda. Clinton has participated in such DLC events before, but never so prominently. The other day I received a survey from Friends of Hillary in the mail, asking my opinion on a broad range of issues (although I wasn’t given a chance to have any input into just what that list of issues is), as well as asking for a donation to Friends of Hillary to help with her re-election campaign. If Hillary were truly interested in uniting the Party and defining a “new” Democratic message, she couldn’t have picked a worse way to do it, imho.

Hillary isn’t really interested in hearing from grassroots Democrats, or in formulating a “new” Democratic message that includes input from all factions within the Party. If she and the other DLC-ers were, they would speak to us in the places we tend to gather… like the many forums and blogs and political communities and organizations online and in our hometowns offline. But we don’t see people like Hillary there. And the request for a donation to Friends of Hillary leads me to believe that this whole survey was nothing more than a self-serving request for money for her own campaign, not an effort to help all Democrats in the elections they will face next year… otherwise, it should have been a request for a donation to the DCCC, not Friends of Hillary.

Painting an image of “moderate” or “centrist” on Democratic candidates is something the DLC has pushed for decades, and rather than it winning elections, I think it has cost the Democrats elections and alienated people from the Party. Why would anyone vote for a Democrat who is seen as “Republican Lite”? If you want to vote for a Republican, there’s no lack of Republicans to vote for. If not “Republican Lite” then I’d see it as not having any principles for which you’re willing to stand up and fight for whatsoever.

What is lacking in the DLC Democrats is a clear difference from the Republicans, an alternate choice, one that is pro-Labor, which the DLC tends to shy away from. If there is no political party that represents Labor, then I guess no one is going to be representing average working people and everyone should just resign themselves that the corporations can just rule everything and democracy is dead, right?

When steroids in baseball and sex and violence in video games are the priority issues our Senators on both sides of the aisle concern themselves with, you have to wonder just how out of touch with average Americans they really are.