Sanders/Warren 2020!!!

A few days ago I sent the message at the very bottom to the Warren campaign.  It was flawed and incomplete and after I circulated it to some people I know politically and/or personally I actually sent out two more messages to those people. Immediately below are some new thoughts etc. that complement what I wrote to her campaign. I got only one response and that person agreed with me but declined to contact the Warren campaign. I am doing this because I believe that I am part of the broad progressive movement that Warren and Sanders are leaders of, and since I can't do normal political activism, I do my blog, I volunteer at a food bank, and I attend progressive events to learn and contribute to the success of the event as an audience member, and this post is my way of participating in the primaries beyond voting (I voted for Sanders in CO's primary). (I can't do activism because I have Depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Tourrette's Syndrome, bad Attention Deficit Disorder, and a brain injury that affects my hearing, my immediate/working memory, and my ability to organize my thoughts)


I believe that the combination of a woman on the ticket and Trump as the alternative will convince some female Clintonites (moderates) to vote for Sanders in the primary. I am not being ridiculous. I think some of them KNOW that he has a better chance in the general, and I THINK they really like the idea of a woman President and VP is a springboard to President.

And the better he does in the primaries, the more united the party will be at the convention and in the general and the more likely that Bernie voters in the general will vote for other Dems down-ballot, and then he has a chance of getting his agenda through Congress.

Also, a lot of female independents who are progressive (and might otherwise have trouble voting for someone, even Sanders, who's a Dem candidate (I don't know what he's been saying recently, but in 2000 Nader said that even progressive Dems should be targeted in elections by the Green Party)) or sort of in the center will vote for Sanders in the general.


My message to Warren’s campaign:

I'm sure you get tons of messages and you're very busy, but I still need to say this. I link from my blog to both Warren and Sanders, but I am a little more enthusiastic about Sanders because I am a socialist and from the beginning he has had a better chance of winning the nomination and a general election. After the results in SC, Warren really needs to drop out and talk with Sanders about being his running mate. I don't know if that sort of thing is done during the primaries but there can't be a law against it. Such a ticket, informal in the remaining primaries and formal in the general will attract some (in the primaries) or a lot (in the general) of support from female Clintonites who would normally hate Sanders. Such a ticket, in the primaries, would help defeat Biden and Bloomberg, and in the general it would have a good chance of defeating Trump.
Thanks for your time reading this and what you've done to promote a progressive agenda.
Tom Shelley
Boulder, CO
tshelley75@comcast.net
https://theblackandthegreen.blogspot.com/

Liberals, Progressives, and Clintionites

In recent years I have struggled with how progressives define liberal. In very early 2003, I organized an anti-war panel discussion sponsored by the Young Democratic Socialists at CU-Boulder and by an embryonic group I started called “Liberals Against War.” I’ll keep this brief for now, although I might do a post about it later (UPDATE 10/29/20 That post is here), but I felt like the main anti-war group at CU-Boulder was trying to convert people to progressives as a way of making them oppose what Bush wanted to do, instead of convincing them that an invasion of Iraq was wrong, and I felt the focus should be on a massive part of the population that would listen to the anti-war movement- liberals, as I define them. But one of the panelists thought I was talking about listening to what pro-war liberal and moderate Democrats had to say. I clarified what I meant. I just found an article about moderate Democrats here.           

The very beginning is:

Twenty-four years ago, I published an essay titled “Liberals, I Do Despise” in the Village Voice, which Common Dreams reprinted as an enduring oldie in 2009. The title was a play on an old doggerel, in this case rendering it:

Liberals and flies, I do despise

The more I see liberals, the more I like flies.

I wrote the essay in disgust after Bill Clinton concluded his and other New Democrats’ deal with the devil by signing the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act—welfare reform—that ended the federal government’s sixty-year commitment to direct income provision for the indigent.

I am frustrated by this progressive obsession with referring to Clinton as a liberal. He was not a liberal as President. Besides being economically moderate or even right-wing (on the internal DP spectrum) and generally being the candidate of the moderate part of the DP in 1992, he was also a militarist and was only sort of socially liberal. Although I’m far from familiar with his environmental record, I get the impression it was pretty bad. Although he was fiercely pro-choice, he took a moderate position on affirmative action (my thoughts about AA are here) and opposed gay marriage. He was “tough on crime.”

His Vice President was married to a woman half responsible for the “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” stickers on many music albums. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with not wanting your kids to hear a bunch of swear words and references to sex and drugs, but there were some serious problems with those stickers. First, those behind them wouldn’t have been successful without massive support from the religious right. Second, many music stores refused to sell albums with the label. Third, I’m willing to bet that the majority of albums affected were by artists who were people of color. And fourth, many of the songs on many of those albums were incredibly political with messages of the sort embraced (to one degree or another) by liberals and progressives.

Welfare reform, although largely a question of economic injustice, was also an example of social injustice if you consider A) the popular, racist image in America of a welfare recipient, and B) the fact that all mothers are working mothers.

Clinton was not a liberal. They are at least socially liberal, often passionately so, slightly skeptical of the military (and favor efforts to avoid war), and I would argue they are a bit to the left of Clinton on economic stuff although not much. They believe strongly in what you might call (STATE) CHARITY, but only sort of in CHANGE (like Single-Payer, laws that would strengthen unions, etc.). (based on what he did with welfare reform, it can be argued that Clinton doesn't consistently believe in (STATE) CHARITY very much)

Progressives seem to think that to the left of center there are only progressives and Clintonites and there is no space in between to be filled by those I would call liberal. Did everyone who opposed welfare reform (strongly) support unions and/or support single-payer health care? Did all straight supporters of gay marriage support economic justice, i.e. oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement? Same thing with affirmative action. To one extent or another there are some other things like that.

(UPDATE 10/5/25 I have a feeling that a lot of readers still don't see a couple things I'm trying to illuminate with this- the difference between a progressive and a liberal and the difference between a liberal and a Clintonite. One argument I make when I think about what my readers may say is that as important as it was that (most) progressives tried to stop Clintonite welfare "reform," welfare is not revolutionary- it did not EMPOWER people and/or TRANSFORM any structure. It was and is reformist- I can easily see MANY liberals opposing "reform" in the Clinton years without supporting single-payer or opposing NAFTA. It was a kind of CHARITY, it was not CHANGE)

Although Obama isn’t a progressive, is he a Clintonite? I could just point to the 2008 primaries, but some would say that it was two Clintonites and the anti-racist/Black vote helped Obama win against the wife of a Democratic President very popular with Democrats. But Obama was a liberal candidate. About 10 years before he ran for President he HAD been a progressive. His Justice Department went after racist police departments and let large numbers of people out of jail. Obamacare is MUCH better than what Hillary Clinton pushed in the 1990s. Unlike Hillary he had opposed the Iraq war. At the end of his presidency he commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the Army whistleblower previously known as Bradley Manning. Some would point to Hillary’s role in the Obama administration, but consider this- it’s not uncommon for Heads of Government to give some positions to people in other factions of their party, and she was only there the first half.

The Clintons are not liberals, but liberals exist. And as a progressive, I believe that here and there many of them are my allies.