The working-class Democratic base

wants a genuinely progressive,

populist, and peace-oriented candidate

Somebody who will challenge corporate power,

and reorient the nation’s priorities

away from imperial plutocracy

Hillary does not fill the bill

Clinton is able to cast herself as an agent of change,

even as her record and policies promise,

above all, cautious continuity

It’s a feat made possibly by the single fact that Clinton

stands to be the first woman elected US president

In a less sexist world, it’d be hard for Clinton

to present herself as any sort of political insurgent

Her husband is the country’s favorite living president,

and her campaign coffers are bulging with establishment dollars

In a sane world, this two-term

senator from New York would be the ultimate insider

The US media, however, can always be relied on

to single out a woman for ‘outsider’ treatment,

and Hillary Clinton is no exception

"Clintonian" Neoliberalism

The Clintonian neoliberals are nearly indistinguishable from the better-known neoconservatives.

Sources for many of the critical elements of the Bush doctrine can be found in the emergence of Clintonian neoliberal thought during the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War.

In think tanks, universities and government offices, left-leaning intellectuals, many close to the Democratic Party, formulated concepts to bring to fruition the age-old dream of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson ‘to make the world safe for democracy.’

These Clintonian neolibs advocated the global expansion of ‘market democracy.’

They presented empirical, theoretical, even philosophical arguments to support the idea of the United States as the indispensable nation.” helping provide “the intellectual substance of much of the Bush doctrine.”

It goes without saying that Hillary Clinton is married to neoliberalism.

Clinton a Progressive? Is Bush a Liberal?

How on earth does Hillary Clinton pull off the image of being a “progressive” outsider fighting for the people and against the big corporate special interests and the masters of war and empire?

Part of the answer is spin, whose state-of-art practitioners both of them can afford with their record-setting backing from the private election investors who do so much to narrow the moral and ideological parameters of U.S. “market democracy.”

Following in the putrid "Third Way" footsteps of the similarly pseudo-progressive Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton is adept at the traditional Democratic Party game of making populist and peace-stressing promises and gestures that” they are guaranteed to betray instantly on the assumption of power.”

She and her handlers know very well how to tap into what a still left Christopher Hitchens once called “the essence of American politics.

That essence,” Hitchens wrote, “consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism. That elite is most successful which can claim the heartiest allegiance of the fickle crowd; can present itself as ‘in touch’ with popular concerns; can anticipate the tides and pulses of opinion; can, in short, be the least apparently elitist.”

According to Laura Flanders, “Hillary’s task is to dress her establishment self up in just enough rebel’s clothing to pacify the critics before the primary, and then win over enough alienated voters in November – probably by persuading them that she’ll change some things, but not too many”

Hillary Clinton: Authoritarian, Imperial Democrat [Original]

The majority working-class Democratic base wants a genuinely progressive, populist, and peace-oriented candidate – somebody who will challenge corporate power, fight for working people of all races and genders, and reorient the nation’s priorities away from imperial plutocracy and towards peace, justice, and democracy.

Hillary does not fill the bill. Featured last summer on the cover of FORTUNE magazine, next to the claim that she is the candidate” that “corporate America is betting on,” Mrs. Clinton is a brazenly authoritarian business and imperial Democrat.

She’s a neoliberal champion of such vicious and reactionary policies as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the abolition of poor families’ entitlement to federal cash assistance.

Infamously shameless about receiving and relying on giant campaign contributions from concentrated wealth, she is fact out-fundraising all other presidential hopefuls on Wall Street.

Her leading benefactors include large health and insurance corporations, who pay her nicely to stay away from the obvious social democratic solution to the nation’s health care crisis: single-payer Canadian style government health.

She refuses to support elementary increases in the taxation of privileged folks’ exorbitant incomes to bolster the funding of Social Security and would inexplicably delay rollback of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans until 2010 (Edwards would rescind the cuts immediately).

Her main political advisor, Mark Penn, runs a corporate public relations firm that “specialize in spin for union-busters, Shell Oil, and big tobacco companies.”

Having been a fierce Iraq invasion hawk well past the point where many moderate Democrats got off the “war” train, Hillary has essentially announced (with her call for keeping combat troops in Iraq to “fight terrorism”) her determination to indefinitely continue the bloody, illegal, racist, mass-murderous, and petro-imperialist occupation of Mesopotamia.

She continues to advance the offensive claim that she had no good reasons to know that the Bush administration was lying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction when she voted to authorize Bush to invade in the fall of 2002.

And contrary to her claims that she wanted and expected Bush to exhaust all “diplomatic options” before choosing “war” (naked imperial aggression, that is) against Iraq, she joined 74 other U.S. senators in voting against Senator Carl Levin’s (D-MI) earlier (several hours before the war authorization vote) proposal of an amendment that would have required the White House to follow a diplomatic process (returning to the UN and perhaps again to Congress) before the legislative branch would fully authorize the use of force.

In campaign speeches and meetings where she likes to accuse Bush of having given “short shrift to diplomacy,” Clinton naturally never mentions “her own vote against Levin’s 2002 amendment, the one that would have required the president to pursue a more diplomatic approach before any invasion of Iraq.”

She would be likely to support a disastrous and criminal Bush attack on Iran. She recently supported the White House’s absurd, provocative, and saber-rattling campaign to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as an “international terrorist organization.”

She voted for the preposterous Kyl-Lieberman Senate resolution, a bill so stupid and malicious that it wasn’t even brought up in the House.

"If Bush actually does make a strike against Iran,” liberal Sunday New York Times columnist Frank Rich notes, “Mrs. Clinton will be the only leading Democrat to have played a cameo role in enabling it.”

And if Hillary is the Democratic nominee in 2008, Rich adds, a fear- and war-mongering Republican will “once again square off against a Democratic opponent who was for a preemptive war before being against it.”

By Laura Flanders’ interesting account, “the job Hillary has signed up for is to win her party’s nomination – and then the country – while keeping the party status quo mostly in place.

"Clinton is seeking the nomination without a record of dissent from Bush on the use of force to solve problems abroad.

She’s also hoping that by muttering things about ‘reviewing NAFTA,’ she won’t have to actually break with her husband’s tainted [corporate-neoliberal, P.S.] policies on domestic spending and trade.”

Fond of looking for “common ground” with reactionary, arch-regressive and messianic-militarist Republicans like Newt Gingrich (co-sponsor of the Clinton administration’s noxious welfare bill), Hillary is what Flanders calls an “ultimate corporate and imperial insider”

Clinton Plays the Sexist Card

Sexism richly assists Hillary’s corporate-sponsored “rebel’s clothing” spin project.

Here’s a perceptive formulation from Laura Flanders:

Hillary Clinton would not be as well-positioned to save the Democratic Party from its base if women in the United States had fewer reasons to be infuriated.

As it is, the junior senator from New York just may be the party leaders’ last best chance for rescue from the angry and disgruntled Democratic voters.

At a time when the anti-war, anti-free trade Democrats are crying out for substantive change in their party and in the country, Clinton is able to cast herself as an agent of that change, even as her record and policies promise, above all, cautious continuity.

It’s a feat made possibly by the single fact that Clinton stands to be the first woman elected US president.

In a less sexist world, it’d be hard for Clinton to present herself as any sort of political insurgent.

Her husband is the country’s favorite living presidents, and her campaign coffers are bulging with establishment dollars.

In a sane world, this two-term senator from New York would be the ultimate insider.

The US media, however, can always be relied on to single out a woman for ‘outsider’ treatment, and Hillary Clinton is no exception.

Hillary’s status as the person with the strongest chance ever to become the first female U.S. president helps her seem like a defiant challenger to political business as usual.