Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Hillary Needs Someone to Blame

Hillary Clinton needs to sharpen her message.   Who is at fault here?  She needs a villain.


Peter Sage Introduction of a Guest Post:

Today I am writing a few 30 second or 60 second spots to post here, either in transcript form or something I will do for YouTube.   The purpose will be to show what I do not want to see: ads that would be effective in causing my progressive neighbors and friends to vote for Jill Stein instead of Hillary.   As I wrote yesterday, I think it is a threat.
Jill Stein

I do this as a form of civic inoculation.   By showing in advance the mischief a conservative SuperPAC might do--fund a liberal candidate whose views they actually oppose--I hope to make it harder for this false flag subterfuge to work.   The light fever of the cow pox disease gave milk maids immunity to smallpox.   I will be vaccinating America tomorrow.

Many Sanders voters express the view that the political system in America is utterly broken. Both Trump and Sanders have identified the thing they believe ails America: globalism and bad trade deals plus the capture of the political system by powerful special interests.   Trump add in the immigration and radicalized American identity piece while Sanders focuses primarily on the money: Wall Street and its oversized influence.   The Brexit votes suggests there is a significant majority coalition of voters who share the general sentiment that the experts and establishment system fails them.
  
Sanders has his villain.  Big bad Wall sTreet banks that needed bailing out by taxpayers but which still have risk and who currently exercise enormous power.   He notes that Hillary has rich friends.  She may be a liberal but she is fatally tainted.
 
In the meantime, Guest Post author Thad Guyer asks the question: who does Hillary blame?   Guyer argues that this is a critical missing piece in the Hillary Clinton message.   Guyer is an attorneywith a practice specializing in defending whistleblowing employees.   He looks closely at the kinds of messages and arguments that are persuasive to judges and juries.

Thad Guyer

Guest Post by Thad Guyer:


I wonder what the polling/voter dynamics are on gender here, where the Green Party candidate is also a woman. It will create an additional front on the "first woman president" narrative for Hillary Clinton to be challenged by Jill Stein. I watched the entire video of the Clinton Warren rally in Ohio (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G54qy1Vu4hI), and it was energizing. Warren was especially uplifting, and her endorsement of Clinton was unequivocal and powerful. Clinton's best moments were her attacks on Trump's character and divisive message. 


So far, Clinton limits her opposition to Trump. But Clinton's message needs a lot of work because she essentially gives a loud call for "change"-- she said we need to change the status quo as to Wall Street, China ripping us off, heavy student loan debt, and jobs and capital being exported. Her message is pretty much cloned from Sanders, but Sanders had a clear enemy set which included Obama and Democrats in league with Republicans-- i.e. "the establishment". Clinton does not name the establishment as a culprit, so it was hard to understand exactly whom she was railing against. 

More disconcerting to me is that her promise to date has been continuing Obama policies, but her message left the inescapable conclusions that (1) Obama failed to win for American workers, and (2) Obama let China rip us off, a point she accentuated with a rousing promise to appoint a "trade prosecutor" to stop the bad trade deals that Obama has apparently allowed-- i.e. the red meat of every Trump rally. She specifically indicted China in Trumpian terms for "dumping steel" in US industrial markets. 

The unspoken question was why did Obama allowed that, and why didn't he establish a "trade prosecutor". Indeed, she made not a single reference to Obama, nor oddly did she attack Republicans. She seemed to have a bipartisan attack on "leaders in Congress" letting the rich profit from an exploitative tax code. She never even mentioned Republican obstruction of Obama's legislative agenda. She sounded as if she is running against the legacy of a Republican administration-- but its been two terms of Obama. She had only a passing reference to Brexit (stock market devaluation) as though the significance of the issue is that Trump wants to profit from a devalued pound. She mentioned the green economy and climate change, but did not mention guns or Obamacare. She had no references at all to the elephant in the room-- border control and immigration.

All in all, while I as a liberal democrat enjoyed her attacks on Trump, I walked away with almost no idea of who Hillary Clinton thinks is responsible for the current economic malaise and domestic terrorism in America. Thus, with Jill Stein claiming corporate profiteering, green energy, climate change, and woman as president turf from Clinton, I was persuaded by the point of your blog that the poll numbers may portend a substantial Ralph Nader type threat of the Green Party siphoning off enough liberal and independent votes to let Trump win. Her narrative will have to more clearly explain how America got in this dark situation that she painted. 

Trump and Republicans are clear on that-- the fault is Obama's. Who does Hillary say caused this mess? She never said. 

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