Has Hillary Clinton Become a Better Candidate Because of Bernie Sanders?

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

No, and she's just feinting left for the primaries.

Heh, tell yourself whatever helps you sleep at night I guess

Oh yeah, it totally helps me sleep to know that the Democrats will most likely be nominating a total neoliberal hawk.

Opposes social security privatization.
Opposes private prisons.
Supports caps on drug prices, and shipping them from Canada
Supports raising the minimum wage.
Supports the Buffet Rule

Please tell me how Hillary is 'neoliberal', like it's not even an accurate description. To claim that her economics are neo-liberal is simply incorrect. Neoliberal is such a stupid word to use

Opposes reinstating Glass Steagall. Had the DNC reverse Obama's ban on taking lobbyist money. Her healthcare plan is "No we can't", opposes any real universal healthcare plan. Called TPP the gold standard until she had to feint left for the primary. Privately lobbied for the Columbia trade deal while publicly opposing it. Supported NAFTA until she ran for President the first time. Pushed countries around the world to frack. Supported the right-wing coup in Honduras. Doesn't support any real reining in of Wall Street; her "cut it out" clearly didn't work. Supported welfare reform. Supported telecommuncations deregulation. Should I go on?

How does that make her a neoliberal? I'm not saying that she's perfect on the economy, but purely supporting NAFTA doesn't automatically make you neoliberal, neither does supporting a right coup in Honduras

Maybe supporting NAFTA by itself doesn't make you a total neoliberal, but the Democratic party has clearly been too pro free trade. It was right after NAFTA passed that Democrats lost the House after controlling it for 40 years.

Supporting a right-wing coup against a democratically elected government should qualify you as a neoliberal.

[Antonio the Sixth]

No, and she's just feinting left for the primaries.

Heh, tell yourself whatever helps you sleep at night I guess

Oh yeah, it totally helps me sleep to know that the Democrats will most likely be nominating a total neoliberal hawk.

Can you post anything that isn't a rehashed talking point? It's starting to worry me.

It's not a talking point that I've been rather disappointed with Obama and there's no hope that Hillary would be any better. Or even as good.

That's your right, and of course Hillary won't be nearly as good as Obama (who is the most progressive President since LBJ, btw), but just repeating the same couple adjectives about her or comparing her to Hindenburg is not a very smart way to express your disappointment.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

No, and she's just feinting left for the primaries.

Heh, tell yourself whatever helps you sleep at night I guess

Oh yeah, it totally helps me sleep to know that the Democrats will most likely be nominating a total neoliberal hawk.

Can you post anything that isn't a rehashed talking point? It's starting to worry me.

It's not a talking point that I've been rather disappointed with Obama and there's no hope that Hillary would be any better. Or even as good.

That's your right, and of course Hillary won't be nearly as good as Obama (who is the most progressive President since LBJ, btw), but just repeating the same couple adjectives about her or comparing her to Hindenburg is not a very smart way to express your disappointment.

It wasn't meant to be a comparison to Hindenberg, that was an example of how lesser of two evil can be highly flawed. Also, I'd say Carter, and the bar was REALLY low to be the most progressive President since Carter. 1996 and 2016 are easily the worst general election matchups since the 1920s.

Anyways, I was very specific about *some* of my disappointments in a later post, but I don't see why I need to go into high levels of detail each time.

[rob in cal]

  I think the Sanders campaign is perfect for Hillary.  She gets some campaign practice in without Bernie really hitting her too hard.  Sort of like a sparring partner in boxing.  Best of both worlds. GOP race OTOH is landing some juicy body blows to all candidates.

[Mercenary]

Yes and no. It has forced to keep her up to the task of campaigning and debating which better prepared her for the general. However, it has also forced her to move left which will hurt her in the general. She is lucky though in that she will face Trump and thus have an even easier general election than primary.

[win win]

She appeals a lot less to me than she did before because she is being dragged too far left by Bernie Sanders.

As a moderate, I really hope she doesn't pander too much to minorities (which she has began doing now). She use to be tougher on the borders and against illegal immigration. All this talk about granting full amnesty to millions is scary. I hope she will change allegiances once the election ends. In fact I expect her to stop her pandering right after she defeats Bernie Sanders.

[This account no longer in use.]

No, and she's just feinting left for the primaries.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

No, and she's just feinting left for the primaries.

Come on, she was praising TPP until the primaries. Similarly she was for NAFTA until she ran for President 8 years ago. In between she was privately lobbying for the Columbia free trade while publically opposing it. She has a long history of triangulation and flip flopping.

[Crumpets]

Meh. Maybe not Sanders specifically - I don't think she's staked out any extra-uber-liberal positions that she wasn't already ready to endorse because of him. But, I think having a competitive primary has made her more prepared for the general and has given her a better understanding of what Americans actually care about vs. what Capitol Hill cares about (see addiction abuse). They've had some feisty debates, and had to outline and defend specific policies, and that will serve her well going into summer.

[ag]

Supporting a right-wing coup against a democratically elected government should qualify you as a neoliberal.

Supporting coups against democratically elected governments is not at all "neoliberal": it is as antithetical to the ideology as it gets. Telling you this as a card-carrying Latin American neoliberal myself It is a great achievement of neoliberalism that today every head of state in Latin America, bar Raul Castro, is duly elected, not imposed in a coup.

But Clinton never "supported" the Honduran coup. At worst, you can argue she tolerated it: a defensible position, given that the government that came to power did not intend to stay and conducted the election as soon as was practicable. Honduras is one of the most disfunctional countries in the region and the coup was an example of general incompetence, rather than some horrid devilish plot.  It was not worth doing much about what happened, and nothing was done. But that hardly constitutes "support". To begin with, the interim government was never formally recognized and threat of non-recognition of the successor government was used to insist on reasonable conduct of elections. Hard to think of much more that could have been done: short of invading the country in order to reimpose Zelaya for the remaining 6 months of his term by force of US military. In fact, you might be unaware (since you do not ever talk to those people), but many (US) rightwingers at the time were accusing Clinton of exactly the opposite: betraying what they believed to be both a legitimate and a pro-American government, because of covert sympathies to the nasty leftist Zelaya "regime". Remember having those arguments myself: I was supporting Clinton in her refusal to support the coup

So, I find the accusation of "supporting a right-wing coup" in this case to be, at best, only tenuously related to facts. At most, you could argue that more could have been done to oppose it - perhaps true, though I see little that could have been achieved that way. It is most definitely true that US played no role in organization or instigation of the coup (something that was purely Honduran from start to finish) and it expressed zero support or sympathy to its organizers.  Accusing Clinton, as the Secretary of State at the time, of supporting that coup seems fairly disingeneous: if anything, there is ample record of the opposite.

[Coolface Sock #42069]

Yes, he has pushed her and forced her to fight for the nomination. She became a better candidate in '08 the further she fell behind Obama.