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Why Young People Are Right About Hillary Clinton | Rolling Stone

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-young-people-are-right-about-hillary-clinton-20160325

Why Young People Are Right About Hillary Clinton

I was disappointed to hear that *Rolling Stone *had endorsed Hillary
Clinton, but I also understood. In many ways, the endorsement by my boss
and editor, Jann Wenner, read like the result of painful soul-searching,
after this very magazine had a profound influence on a similar race, back
in 1972.

Jann explains this eloquently in "Hillary Clinton for President
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/hillary-clinton-for-president-20160323#ixzz43pTrdB9i>
":

"*Rolling Stone *has championed the 'youth vote' since 1972, when
18-year-olds were first given the right to vote. The Vietnam War was a fact
of daily life then, and Sen. George McGovern, the liberal anti-war activist
from South Dakota, became the first vessel of young Americans, and Hunter
S. Thompson wrote our first presidential-campaign coverage. We worked
furiously for McGovern. We failed; Nixon was re-elected in a landslide."

The failure of George McGovern had a major impact on a generation of
Democrats, who believed they'd faced a painful reality about the limits of
idealism in American politics. Jann sums it up: "Those of us there learned
a very clear lesson: America chooses its presidents from the middle, not
from the ideological wings."

But it would be a shame if we disqualified every honest politician, or
forever disavowed the judgment of young people, just because George
McGovern lost an election four decades ago.

That '72 loss hovered like a raincloud over the Democrats until Bill
Clinton came along. He took the White House using a formula engineered by a
think tank, the Democratic Leadership Council, that was created in response
to losses by McGovern and Walter Mondale.

The new strategy was a party that was socially liberal but fiscally
conservative. It counterattacked Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, a
racially themed appeal to disaffected whites Nixon tabbed the "Silent
Majority," by subtly taking positions against the Democrats' own left flank.

In 1992 and in 1996, Clinton recaptured some of Nixon's territory through a
mix of populist positions (like a middle-class tax cut) and the
"triangulating" technique of pushing back against the Democrats' own
liberal legacy on issues like welfare, crime and trade.

And that was the point. No more McGoverns. The chief moral argument of the
Clinton revolution was not about striving for an end to the war or poverty
or racism or inequality, but keeping the far worse Republicans out of power.

The new Democratic version of idealism came in a package called
"transactional politics." It was about getting the best deal possible given
the political realities, which we were led to believe were hopelessly
stacked against the hopes and dreams of the young.

In fact, it was during Bill Clinton's presidency that D.C. pundits first
began complaining about a thing they called "purity." This was code for any
politician who stood too much on principle. *The American Prospect *in
1995 derisively
described
<http://prospect.org/article/friends-bill-why-liberals-should-let-clinton#articlecont>
it as an "unwillingness to share the burden of morally ambiguous
compromise." Sometimes you had to budge a little for the sake of progress.

Jann describes this in the context of saluting the value of "incremental
politics" and solutions that "stand a chance of working." The implication
is that even when young people believe in the right things, they often
don't realize what it takes to get things done.

But I think they do understand. Young people have repudiated the campaign
of Hillary Clinton in overwhelming and historic fashion, with Bernie
Sanders winning under-30 voters by consistently absurd margins, as high as
80 to 85 percent in many states. He has done less well with young
African-American voters, but even there he's seen some gains
<http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/sanders-broke-demographic-mold-to-win-michigan.html>
as time has gone on. And the energy coming from the pre-middle-aged has
little to do with an inability to appreciate political reality.

Instead, the millions of young voters that are rejecting Hillary's campaign
this year are making a carefully reasoned, even reluctant calculation about
the limits of the insider politics both she and her husband have
represented.

For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq
invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic
surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others.

And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including
Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of
these issues.

Hillary not only voted for the Iraq War, but offered a succession of
ridiculous excuses for her vote. Remember, this was one of the easiest
calls ever. A child could see that the Bush administration's fairy tales
about WMDs and Iraqi drones spraying poison
<http://www.foxnews.com/story/2003/02/24/iraqi-drones-may-target-us-cities.html>
over the capital (where were they going to launch from, Martha's Vineyard?)
were just that, fairy tales.

Yet Hillary voted for the invasion for the same reason many other
mainstream Democrats did: They didn't want to be tagged as McGovernite
peaceniks. The new Democratic Party refused to be seen as being too
antiwar, even at the cost of supporting a wrong one.
[image: George McGovern; 1972 Election; Young Voters] George McGovern
addressing a group of students at the University of Wisconsin in March
1972. AP

It was a classic "we can't be too pure" moment. Hillary gambled that
Democrats would understand that she'd outraged conscience and common sense
for the sake of the Democrats' electoral viability going forward. As a
mock-Hillary in a 2007 *Saturday Night Live *episode put it
<https://newrepublic.com/article/64828/hillarys-war>, "Democrats know me….
They know my support for the Iraq War has always been insincere."

This pattern, of modern Democrats bending so far back to preserve what they
believe is their claim on the middle that they end up plainly in the wrong,
has continually repeated itself.

Take the mass incarceration phenomenon. This was pioneered in Mario Cuomo's
New York
<http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-prison-industrial-complex/304669/>
and furthered under Bill Clinton's presidency, which authorized more than
$16 billion for new prisons and more police in a crime bill.

As *The New Jim Crow *author Michelle Alexander noted, America when Bill
Clinton left office had the world's highest incarceration rate, with a prison
admission rate
<http://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-does-not-deserve-black-peoples-votes/>
for black drug inmates that was 23 times 1983 levels. Hillary stumped for
that crime bill, adding the Reaganesque
<http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=44300> observation that inner-city
criminals were "super-predators" who needed to be "brought to heel
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsSDqbot-EI>."

You can go on down the line of all these issues. Trade? From NAFTA to the
TPP, Hillary and her party cohorts have consistently supported
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/hillary-clinton-2016-free-trade-213231>
these anti-union free trade agreements, until it became politically
inexpedient. Debt? Hillary infamously voted
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/us/politics/the-vote-for-bankruptcy-reform-that-haunts-hillary-clinton.html>
for regressive bankruptcy reform just a few years after privately meeting
with Elizabeth Warren and agreeing that such industry-driven efforts to
choke off debt relief needed to be stopped.

Then of course there is the matter of the great gobs of money Hillary has
taken to give speeches to Goldman Sachs and God knows whom else. Her answer
about that — "That's what they offered
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCnwOjgVdog>" — gets right to the heart of
what young people find so repugnant about this brand of politics.

One can talk about having the strength to get things done, given the
political reality of the times. But one also can become too easily
convinced of certain political realities, particularly when they're paying
you hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour.

Is Hillary really doing the most good that she can do, fighting for the
best deal that's there to get for ordinary people?

Or is she just doing something that satisfies her own definition of that,
while taking tens of millions of dollars
<http://www.wsj.com/articles/clintons-received-more-than-25-million-from-speeches-since-january-2014-1431730968>
from some of the world's biggest jerks?

I doubt even Hillary Clinton could answer that question. She has been
playing the inside game for so long, she seems to have become lost in it.
She behaves like a person who often doesn't know what the truth is, but
instead merely reaches for what is the best answer in that moment, not
realizing the difference.

This is why her shifting explanations
<http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/02/04/hillary-clintons-email-habits-careless-or-criminal>
and flippant attitude
<http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary-clinton-jokes-wiping-email-server-cloth/story?id=33165517>
about the email scandal are almost more unnerving than the ostensible
offense. She seems confident that just because her detractors are
politically motivated, as they always have been, that they must be wrong,
as they often were.

But that's faulty thinking. My worry is that Democrats like Hillary have
been saying, "The Republicans are worse!" for so long that they've begun to
believe it excuses everything. It makes me nervous to see Hillary
supporters like law professor Stephen Vladeck arguing in the *New York
Times*
<http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/02/04/hillary-clintons-email-habits-careless-or-criminal>
that the real problem wasn't anything Hillary did, but that the Espionage
Act isn't "practical."

If you're willing to extend the "purity" argument to the *Espionage Act*,
it's only a matter of time before you get in real trouble. And even if
it doesn't
happen this summer
<http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430343/hillary-clinton-email-scandal-fbi-director-james-comey-resign-protest>,
Democrats may soon wish they'd picked the frumpy senator from Vermont who
probably checks his restaurant bills to make sure he hasn't been *under*
charged.

But in the age of Trump, winning is the only thing that matters, right? In
that case, there's plenty of evidence suggesting Sanders would perform better
against a reality TV free-coverage machine like Trump
<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_presidential_race.html>
than would Hillary Clinton
<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_presidential_race.html>.
This would largely be due to the passion and energy of young voters.

Young people don't see the Sanders-Clinton race as a choice between
idealism and incremental progress. The choice they see is between an honest
politician, and one who is so profoundly a part of the problem that she
can't even see it anymore.

They've seen in the last decades that politicians who promise they can
deliver change while also taking the money, mostly just end up taking the
money.

And they're voting for Sanders because his idea of an entirely voter-funded
electoral "revolution" that bars corporate money is, no matter what its
objective chances of success, the only practical road left to break what
they perceive to be an inexorable pattern of corruption.

Young people aren't dreaming. They're thinking. And we should listen to
them.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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