{"id":11196,"date":"2017-08-23T19:43:45","date_gmt":"2017-08-24T00:43:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=11196"},"modified":"2017-08-23T19:43:45","modified_gmt":"2017-08-24T00:43:45","slug":"keep-in-mind-the-entire-context","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2017\/08\/23\/keep-in-mind-the-entire-context\/","title":{"rendered":"Keep In Mind The Entire Context"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Drum remarks<\/a> upon the difficulties of uniting the Democratic Party, which I suppose I’m happy enough to take his word for, not being the sort to pay much attention to the technical difficulties of a “big tent” party. But I think he suffers a hiccup in his reasoning in the addendum:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a good example of this in Warren\u2019s speech, where she says this:<\/a><\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, I saw an op-ed in the New York Times<\/em> from a so-called Democratic strategist titled, \u201cBack to the Center, Democrats.\u201d\u2026We\u2019ve been warned off before. Give up, keep your heads down, be realistic, act like a grown-up, keep doing the same old same old.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s what\u2019s interesting: instead of lots of ferocious back-and- forth and piling on, this time, no one cared. Big yawn. Why? Because the Democratic Party isn\u2019t going back to the days of welfare reform and the crime bill.<\/strong>\u00b9 It is NOT going to happen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bill Clinton campaigned on both those things and he won the presidency. But when he actually followed through, a lot of lefty Democrats rebelled. Nevertheless, Clinton won reelection by a huge margin. Warren is correct that the Democratic Party has moved left on these issues since Clinton\u2019s presidency, but she\u2019s not correct that this means moderates no longer exist. They do, and Democrats still need them to win.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s one big omission in Kevin’s reasoning: President Clinton’s opposition<\/em>. Bob Dole ran a poor campaign and didn’t have the personal charisma that I’m told President Clinton had (I never understood that myself, but I’ll stipulate it). Clinton beat Dole by nearly 9% points in the popular vote. Some of that might be attributable to welfare and crime, but I doubt much of it. I remember that campaign, and Dole really never had a chance, despite Clinton’s political failings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin Drum remarks upon the difficulties of uniting the Democratic Party, which I suppose I’m happy enough to take his word for, not being the sort to pay much attention to the technical difficulties of a “big tent” party. But I think he suffers a hiccup in his reasoning in \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11196"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11197,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11196\/revisions\/11197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}