Twenty years ago this month Bill Clinton ended “welfare as we know it” and broke up federally managed aid to dependent families by creating welfare block grants for states to manage on their own. Instead of a single welfare system governed by a set of equitably applied standards, 50 individual welfare systems were born. The result is a Queen of Hearts Wonderland that is more bureaucratic, more complex, less successful, and with less direct aid going to the poor.
This same President began the privatization of our prison systems and incentivized university R&D departments to collaborate with corporations to develop new drugs and technologies. Clinton made it possible for us to become a country that makes money off death row and life sentences and to wink when drug prices go up 500%. If modern-day Republicans had the capacity to read and understand history they’d know that Bill Clinton’s policies make Ronald Reagan’s administration look like a May Day Celebration in Red Square.
Anyone willing to vote for Donald Trump is beyond appeals to reason or common decency, but it is well past time for the American people to have a come to Jesus meeting with the Democratic Party. Has its embrace of identity and elitist politics become so all-consuming that it’s willing to have the sleaziest of political families represent its heart and soul? And, of the 124,000,000 adult women in the United States, was Hillary Clinton the best woman they could find? Really?
Pragmatists, those “Stop Trump at any cost!” whiners, are not excused from the meeting. They need to explain how the party they support nominated a candidate so weak that any Republican other than the drooling troll the GOP nominated would beat her like a rug. Is there such a deficit of talent among Democrats that they had no other choice? Or, is the party’s establishment so intellectually vacant that it actually thinks Clinton’s nebulous “me too” agenda resonates with voters?
Yes, voters should shoot themselves in the foot rather than in the head. But Clinton pragmatists are also responsible for explaining how Hillary won’t screw the poor and working class as badly as Bill did.
Thank you