This is a dishonest campaign: 17 Hillary Clinton memes the media just won’t stop pushing — or factcheck

www.salon.com|Corey Robin

For the last two weeks or so, I have been trying to stay focused on my work on Clarence Thomas, but all the liberal commentary on the Democratic primary has gotten me so irritated that I keep finding myself back on social media, posting, tweeting, commenting and the like. So I figured I’d bring everything that I’ve been saying about the election campaign there, here. In no particular order. And with no effort to be scholarly or scientific. Just my random observations and musings…

We’ve been here before: Bill Clinton’s getting more involved in Hillary’s campaign as she loses ground — but will it help?

www.salon.com|Sean Illing

The path to the Democratic nomination was clear for Hillary Clinton. In an uncommonly small field with no viable establishment challengers, Clinton was the obvious front-runner. She has all the experience, the overwhelming support of party elites, and plenty of money.

Clinton may still be the front-runner, but the race won’t be nearly as uncontested as everyone once thought. We learned last week that Sanders and Clinton are now neck and neck in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two primary states. Clinton has downplayed these numbers, insisting she knew all along that this would be a tough race, but that’s very likely untrue. Clinton, like everyone else, assumed for months that this was her nomination to lose.

Anti-Clinton misogynists: If Bill’s attackers are “defenders of women,” why do they have a history of sexism?

For such self-appointed defenders of women, Bill Clinton's attackers have a serious and ugly history of misogyny

www.salon.com|Amanda Marcotte

Donald Trump isn’t the only rather unusual self-appointed champion of women these days, as he runs around flinging accusations that Bill Clinton is an “abuser” of women and that this somehow makes Hillary Clinton, by the transitive property of marriage, an “abuser” as well. Trump is being aided in his mission by Roger Stone, an old-school dirty trickster and spooler of right-wing bullshit, who has declared that he will be hounding Clinton with accusations of sexual abuse and harassment as long as she dares to run for president.

So who is this Roger Stone, who would like you to see him as a hero to women? Oliver Willis of Media Matters has put together a report and Stone’s devout feminism and respect for womankind sure is exciting to behold:

During the 2008 election cycle, Stone created the group Citizens United Not Timid (C.U.N.T.) to attack Hillary Clinton. Stone promoted the false story that there was a video of Michelle Obama making racist remarks about white people.

Oil, money, politics and evil: Our leading Middle East ally is the worst country imaginable

www.salon.com|Andrew O'Hehir

American foreign policy is full of things we can’t see and things we don’t talk about. The drone war of the Obama years; the “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” of the George W. Bush years. Nixon and Kissinger’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. The overthrow of democratic governments we didn’t like: Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Once you get started with this stuff it’s hard to stop, and pretty soon your friends are giving you that look, like they’re wondering at what point you’ll start talking about your stormy personal relationship with Richard Helms, or the microchips implanted in your dental work.

But even by those standards, the case of Saudi Arabia is special. We love Saudi Arabia so much! The Bush family loves Saudi Arabia; the Clinton family loves Saudi Arabia. You and I are frequently told that we love Saudi Arabia, even if we aren’t exactly sure why. 

Bill, Hillary and the women: Should millennials care about Bill Clinton’s sex scandals?

www.salon.com|Silpa Kovvali

After Donald Trump took a jab at Hillary Clinton last week over Bill Clinton’s “terrible record of women abuse,” Bill Clinton’s past behavior toward women has once again been thrust into the limelight. But Slate’s Jamelle Bouie argues it’s unlikely to do significant damage to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy because of the demographics of the electorate, in particular the 31 percent of it composed by 18- to 35-year-olds. “Will this group care about Bill Clinton’s infidelity? Anything is possible. But odds are they won’t…for the simple reason that they’re too young for it to matter to their political identity,” he writes.

Bouie goes on to draw two overarching conclusions, neither of which I dispute. The first is that both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush can redefine themselves for a voting public who have not yet formed concrete pictures of them. The second, more problematic, is that modern political campaigns have become an exercise in mobilizing supporters, rather than persuading dissenters.

Bill Clinton is a political liability: In a race against Bernie Sanders, his neoliberal legacy could be toxic

www.salon.com|Conor Lynch

On Monday, former President Bill Clinton hit the campaign trail in New Hampshire, after remaining largely on the sidelines since Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy back in April. His first solo speech, however, was not the great success Hillary has surely hoped for. As Michael Sainato describes in the New York Observer:

“During [Bill’s] speech, several women on stage had noticeable trouble paying attention to Mr. Clinton, and acted thoroughly unimpressed with what he had to say. The event itself had few attendants, and those who did turn out in support of Ms. Clinton seemed lethargic at best.”

Responding in typical fashion to the news that Bill would be hitting the campaign trail, Donald Trump wrote on Twitter: “If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women’s card on me, she’s wrong!”

Secretary of schmoozing: How new Hillary emails reveal what friendliness in Washington really means

www.salon.com|Elias Isquith

It’s one of those memes that everyone will soon forget, but it used to be conventional wisdom — in D.C., I mean — that the gridlock that’s characterized much of President Obama’s tenure was the result of his being “aloof” or not liking people.

Rather than point to structural explanations, pundits in the center and on the right would suggest that if President Obama would just spend more time “schmoozing” and glad-handing, he’d be able to get various members of Congress — including some Republicans! — to go against whatever they deem to be in their self-interest and do what he wanted instead.

Turning Bill Clinton into Bill Cosby: Sorry, conservatives, there’s a massive difference between their sex abuse allegations

www.salon.com|Amanda Marcotte

Heaven save us all from conservatives who think they have a “gotcha.”

And boy they sure think they have one with Bill Clinton and the supposed “hypocrisy” of feminists who don’t agree that his wife’s career should be derailed because of allegations of sexual harassment and assault made against him in the 1990s.

At stake is this alleged unfairness that while some men accused of sexual abuse get in actual trouble for it, Clinton walks around free and even gets to campaign for his wife. Meanwhile Hillary Clinton, who, in a bit of ironically sexist logic for these supposed defenders of feminist integrity, is treated as an extension of her husband and therefore guilty of anything he might have done.

“Why is Bill Cosby finished? He was the most beloved guy,” complained Mark Steyn last week, drawing into question whether he’s angrier that Bill Clinton isn’t in trouble or that Bill Cosby is.

Gen X vs. Bill Clinton: Cobain and Clinton, “Seinfeld” and “Simpsons,” and the ’90s fight for America’s soul

www.salon.com|Gil Troy

On April 8, 1994 an electrician named Gary Smith, dispatched to install a security system at a four-bedroom, five-bathroom turn-of-the-century mansion in Seattle, found no one home. Peering through a window, he thought he saw a fallen mannequin. Once he realized it was the corpse of Kurt Cobain, the twenty-seven-year-old lead singer of the grunge band Nirvana, Smith called a local Seattle radio station before calling the police.

Three days earlier, Cobain, fleeing drug treatment, binging on heroin and valium, had shot himself in the head. The troubadour of trauma for the twentysomethings’ recently christened “Generation X,” Cobain felt crushed between the edginess of his art and the machinery marketing his music. Modern popular culture now specialized in domesticating musical outlaws so they could afford luxuries like the $1.5 million home Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love, had purchased that January. “The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun,” Cobain wrote in his suicide note.

“We had this period of peace and prosperity, and what did we do with it?”: Historian Gil Troy reexamines the Clintons and the 1990s

www.salon.com|Elias Isquith

Despite Sen. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump’s early campaign success, it remains overwhelmingly likely that either Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush — or both! — will be a major party’s presidential nominee in 2016. Consequently, it is almost guaranteed that next year’s presidential race will be, at least in part, a referendum on the 1990s.

Twenty years is not such a long time, really, so you might figure there’s little to reassess. But as historian Gil Troy’s new book, “The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s,” reveals, just because a time period is in our living memory — just because we ourselves experienced that era, first-hand — that doesn’t mean we necessarily understand it. And while Troy’s book touches on many of the signal moments of the decade (from the rise of Clinton’s “new Democrats” to his becoming the second president in U.S. history to be impeached) it also reveals our recent past, and perhaps our near-term future, in a new light.

Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Troy about his book, the man at its center, the decade it explores, and how many of the problems that define our politics today can be traced back to the Clinton era. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

More than two decades after he helped us understand so-called “Reagan Democrats” back in the Bill Clinton years, Stan Greenberg continues to mine the thinking of the elusive (for Democrats) white working class voter as we head into what may be the Hillary Clinton years. “The Average Joe proviso” offers intriguing clues about how Democrats can win key blocs of working class whites, most notably women, and particularly unmarried women. It’s an important read, in the wake of a New York Times piece that worried Clinton was abandoning her husband’s pitch to working class whites and following Barack Obama’s “far narrower path to the presidency.” (I debunked the ludicrous notion of that path being “narrower” here.)

Over the past four decades, Democrats and Republicans have agreed on almost nothing beyond their ménage à trois love affair with Wall Street. One notable exception was the bipartisan fervor for crime policy “reform” that could be condensed into a campaign-ad bromide: lock ‘em up and throw away the key. A popular American lament rues the lack of political cooperation in Washington and in statehouses. But be careful what you wish for. Bipartisanship in the 1980s and ‘90s sowed the seeds for today’s mass incarceration crisis as pols cultivated crime platitudes over thoughtful analysis. And undoing this now-codified, multibillion-dollar political botch-job won’t be easy, despite the kumbaya incantations coming from both the Right and Left.

If the 1992 Los Angeles riots opened the era of (Bill) Clinton liberalism, the Baltimore unrest marked its close. Los Angeles gave Clinton his famous “Sister Souljah” moment, which told white voters that his party would no longer merely blame racism for the troubles of the African-American poor. Getting tough on crime; pushing through welfare reform; calling for “a new conversation on race”; Clinton believed he could update the idealism of the 1960s with the lessons of 1980s Reaganism, and do well politically while also doing good. The Baltimore riots 23 years later show us the stark limits of that approach. The 2016 Democratic presidential primary offers the party a chance to debate a post-Clinton agenda, even if the front-runner is named Clinton, while Republicans cling to a warmed-over Reaganism that blames poor people for their poverty.

President Clinton famously told us “The era of big government is over.” The Baltimore tragedy is trying to tell us, if we didn’t already know, that the era of (Bill) Clinton liberalism is over — just when his wife has her best shot at becoming president. In the wake of the Baltimore unrest, a stunning 96 percent of Americans polled by NBC News say they expect more urban riots this summer. Yet there’s little visible urgency around preventing that outcome.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders told ABC News’ Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl that he considers the role the obscenely wealthy play in politics to be “a very serious problem.” The independent specified that “it’s not just about Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton [but] about a political system today that is dominated by big money — it’s about the Koch brothers being prepared to spend $900 million in the coming election.”