Politicians say whatever they’re going to say, but there are a lot of things they tend not to say. One thing they almost never say is that we’re locking up too many people in this country. So, I welcome Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric even if I will definitely be taking a “wait and see” attitude.
Hillary Rodham Clinton focused her presidential campaign Wednesday on the unrest in Baltimore, vowing to work to upend the criminal justice system by ending the “era of mass incarceration” and equipping every police officer on the street with a body camera.
Her speech at Columbia University in New York City marked the unveiling of Clinton’s first major policy proposal as a presidential hopeful, coming as candidates are under pressure to confront racial disparities in the criminal justice system highlighted by the violence in Baltimore.
“What we have seen in Baltimore should, and I think does, tear at our soul,” Clinton said. “The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. … We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.”
I am pretty cynical, especially about both Clintons, but I do not totally dismiss the value of Hillary’s listening tours.
Clinton’s plan also stems from the “listening tour” she has been on since launching her campaign this month. In round-table meetings with residents in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, the issue of drug abusers whose troubles were compounded by mental health problems played prominently.
“Our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions,” Clinton said. “I was somewhat surprised in both Iowa and New Hampshire to be asked so many questions about mental health.”
I don’t blame Hillary for living in a bubble and I’m willing to give her credit for making a concerted effort to get outside of it and get a taste of what’s really going on in this country. I’ve been writing about the opioid problem for a while now from a variety of angles, and one of the most important is treatment. Another, related, issue that’s important is how we treat people who commit crimes in the pursuit of feeding their addictions.
These problems are only a part of what is ailing Baltimore, our cities generally, and the nation, but they’re usually ignored.
I am extremely skeptical of Hillary Clinton, but I was pleasantly surprised by her response to the Baltimore riots and in addition to what you posted, her comments about income inequality. At the very least I think she is getting good advice on effective campaign messaging, because she needs to get the base charged.
Hillary needs to “wonk” her way to the White House. If she combines that with being the first female nominee and the Obama Coalition, she could win that rout we need to win back at least the Senate.
Yes, she follows her husband’s trait of being a lawyer first and a human being second, but she’s wicked smart and wicked experienced. She shouldn’t run away from what her strengths are.
As someone whose family has had to make multiple trips over the last 30 years through the frustrating sausage grinder that is our combination criminal justice/mental health system, I always welcome a high profile person who makes an honest attempt to bring this issue into the national spotlight with the seriousness that it deserves. Much like the issue of police brutality, we have continually swept this issue under the rug. It only seems to rear its head when some incident occurs that exposes the horrible inadequacies and inequalities in the system. Certainly, the default position for most politicians has been the “build more prisons and fill ’em up” mantra; as is evident in the national statistics for incarceration, and especially the incarceration of the mentally ill. Unfortunately, I have very little hope that anyone on the other side of the political aisle (all those “family value” types) will do anything on this issue, other than to be craven and heartless SOB’s.
Addressing all aspects of mental illness, especially as it relates to our criminal justice system, has to be one of the points of the spear if there is any hope for us having a rational national conversation about this. Of course, I fully expect this to be politicized and demagogued by the other side , simply because it is something that has been brought up by a Democrat. And while there is a racial component that is present within this issue, in no way is it solely a problem within the minority community. My lily white, Midwestern, middle class family can certainly attest to that fact. This problem touches most all of the major demographics of the entire country. And no one thinks they will ever have to deal with it, until one day they do. Believe me, it is not a fraternity to which you want to belong.
So Hillary, bring it on. I’m eager, ready and willing to participate in the discussion.
ya know, its really getting tiresome.
No one Democrat who had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the nomination for president in my lifetime has ever said that the prison system is out of control.
N E V E R.
Not LBJ. Not Carter. Not Eugene. Not Tsongas. Not Bill. Not Kerry. Not Muskie. Hell, I don’t think Kuchinich said anything about it. Not ONE of them.
She is saying things now that could get her NOT ELECTED. She knows that this will not be forgotten. This is not an issue that resonates with white people. If anything, it is an issue that negatively impacts nearly all white political thought.
This is not an issue that resonates with the latino vote, the gay vote, the moms vote. This is not triangulation. There’s no one who cares about this issue that won’t already vote for her.
Booman, you don’t sound like someone who is tired of defending Hillary. You sound like someone who hopes she loses the nomination.
Hillary doesn’t need to get undecided people to vote for her. There are few swing voters today; elections are about turnout. She needs to get her supporters to vote and this kind of thing will absolutely do it.
I’m also enthusiastic to see Hillary seems to understand that we have a completely different electorate from the one that elected her husband in 1992. Back then, the key was getting enough Conservadems to stick with the party without pissing the liberals off too much. Now, it’s about getting enough liberal voters to show up.
I’m also enthusiastic about cop cams and minimal jail sentences for drug use. Cop cams have been cutting police abuse by over 50% – that would be a great win!
I do wonder if there might be white backlash voting like with Nixon and Agnew.
There has already been white backlash voting. It seriously can’t get much worse than it already is without Hillary Clinton going ‘let’s tax the shit out of white folk and put it in a pension fund for crack babies!’.
Urbanization, secularization, and of course the existence of stalwart white voters such as gays and Jews and white Muslims puts a backstop on how far the Democratic Party can fall. I mean, in the South the Democratic Party already gets less than 15% of the white vote in Presidential elections.
A reasonable concern. One step forward for minorities is generally good for one election cycle and the subsequent backlash is good for at least two election cycles.
Will 2016 be like 1952?
I could live with that (really what else can I do?) if that step forward remains and we don’t get shoved back a couple steps. Though I have no doubt many folk are busily figuring out how to do just that.
No. The step forward doesn’t remain. How often has a riot not benefited TPTB?
Why should LBJ have said anything when the incarceration was declining in his time.?
It was after 1980 that it became to climb. And at the federal level took off after 1990. So, guess it’s time for a second Clinton to “fix” what the first one did. Or another Bush to “fix” something the last one did who “fixed” Iraq after his daddy didn’t get that one “right.”
Whether she really believes it, or is only doing so because she thinks it’s electorally significant doesn’t really matter inasmuch that the effect is the same.
That said, thankfully Bernie Sanders is now going to run so I can dump O’Malley.
Everybody above is correct- Clinton is right on both the substance and the politics. Cynicism about pols is inevitable and justified, and yet unimportant; if they arrive at the right policies there’s not much reason to care why and by what route they got there. So, applause for Clinton.
I guess that announcement about some guy from Vermont running for President isn’t really news. No word in the NYTimes that I can find.
re: Snowballs chance in hell.
He’s running to raise the issues, from what I’ve heard. and that’s good. It will keep democratic candidates positions in the news and maybe give Hillary a chance to react genuinely to issues as evidently she’s reacting to Baltimore.
Bernie Sanders is such a joke candidate that I would suspect that his candidacy was a facile form of concern trolling from centrist Dems not really interested in having a challenge from the left if there weren’t a bunch of leftists sincere about this.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, Webb and O’Malley are deeply flawed candidates. But Clinton would actually have to hit them on the issues to neuter their support. If Clinton wants to sink O’Malley, she has to bring up stuff like the failed zero tolerance policies and the passive support for fracking and trusting pensions pegged to hedge funds. Yet with Bernie, Clinton doesn’t even have to acknowledge Sander’s positions at all. She can just endlessly scoff at his age, his socialist label, and his years-long independent label.
Seriously, how can so many leftists be on board with Bernie Sanders? News flash, people: Martin Luther King Jr. would not have been taken seriously if he had a lisp and a bad toupee.
She’d have to find it first….
You know, a lot of leftists blame Hillary Clinton for smothering the field so much that no leftist will jump into the race, but then I see ~25% of potential Democratic primary voters having Warren or Sanders at the top of the list and it makes me think that more of the problem lies with the voters themselves.
If you’re a candidate that’s to the left of Hillary Clinton on many issues but you you’re not pure enough for the DailyKos primary, why would you even bother running? You’re not only up against Clinton but an idealized dream candidate who, despite having no chance of being President/winning the primary, you will never gain traction against.
I was big behind O’Malley because I think that despite a lot of his missteps he is significantly to the left of Hillary Clinton and has just what’s needed to make 2016-2020 anything but a Pyrrhic victory, but after the Baltimore riots I realize that he’s probably dead in the water. Because his legitimately wrongheaded and even racist zero-tolerance policies irrevocably tainted his purity.
“Yet with Bernie, Clinton doesn’t even have to acknowledge Sander’s positions at all.”
Well, this view does not appear to be true, at all:
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/hillary-clinton-welcomes-bernie-sanders-117525.html
“I agree with Bernie,” Hillary responded.
She’s only spoken to pre-screened voters. She hasn’t done any voter interaction behind that. She’s been doing closed-door events with donors or speeches like today where she didn’t have to interact with audience. She’s done no interviews and hasn’t answered 1 tough question.
And we are supposed to applaud someone who touted tough on crime policies including the death penalty, increased prisons and 3 strikes laws and did nothing in the Senate to address police brutality, prison/sentencing reform or repeal of death penalty. Who gives a shit what she says now when she’s done nothing in her career to address these issues. People can’t really be gullible enough to think she is going to give 1 shit about any of this once she wins the Democratic nomination right?
People can’t really be gullible enough to think she is going to give 1 shit about any of this once she wins the Democratic nomination right?
Of course they can. We only care what candidates say today; past words and deeds are irrelevant unless they’re in sync with today’s words. That’s one reason why I vacillate between blaming our horrendous politicians and blaming the stupid/gullible voters; the dances and songs have gotten really old and way too predictable for me.
No, but these people are still gullible enough to waste their time chasing after lost causes like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. They’re just as stupid as the people who hope that Hillary Clinton turns out to be a secret populist, but they’re stupid in a different way.
Hell, I think that the Sanders-chasers are even stupider than the Clinton-hopers. At least there’s major precedent for Democratic Presidents govern more from the left than their candidacy and record had shown prior to the Presidency.
At least there’s major precedent for Democratic Presidents govern more from the left than their candidacy and record had shown prior to the Presidency.
Not in the living memory of a majority of the electorate. This borders on a claim that Republican Presidents can’t be racist because Lincoln issued the Emancipation Declaration.
While I’m not part of the draft E. Warren for POTUS brigade for a few practical reasons, dismissing them as gullible lost cause chasers is narrow and short-sighted. Their efforts have increased Warren’s national profile beyond what it would be without them, and it is helpful for more people to hear a different voice that they can understand and agree with. Where that goes, we don’t know, but it is an authentic antidote to the GOP/DLC capitalist preachers that have had practically exclusive control of the national megaphone for decades. Having Sanders out there is helpful as well — because well over 90% of the electorate believes that socialists are really scary without ever having seen or heard from one.
The barriers to running and electing an authentic, experienced, competent, smart, and decent person to serve the people as President have always been huge. The odds may not even be worse today than they were in the past. However, for a few decades Democratic voters had the illusion that voters were choosing the nominee. Now we can stop pretending and deal with how ugliness of it all.
The Draft Warren and Sanders people are gullible lost-cause chasers because leftists are putting all of their hopes and dreams on a pure candidate whose issues or style will cause them to hit a ceiling early.
Warren is an effective spokesperson for liberal causes and she’s a great fundraiser to boot. She’d be a great spearhead for the revival of leftism were it not for the fact that she’s wholly uninterested in doing so as a President. That’s fine, but people are wasting their time chasing the Warren rainbow rather than trying to recruit a not-so-pure person that actually wants to run.
Anyone who thinks that Bernie Sanders can be an effective spokesperson outside of the leftist base is terminally stuck in the DailyKos/Salon/Jezebel bubble. Look at his interviews or his speeches, not through the eyes of an intelligent voter but through the eyes of Joe Sixpack. His content is great and he walks the walk, but he’s also a living, breathing stereotype of the effete, disheveled liberal that has served as a punching bag for conservatives for the past 40 years. It doesn’t matter what he’s saying or how intelligently he says it, all non-liberals can hear is ‘herpa derpa socialism unions arugula lattes’.
I have no idea where they got the idea that they had more choice then than now. Are you saying that before the Jimmy Carter era (about when the establishment hold on the primary process was irrevocably damaged) Democratic Party voters had more choice in their candidate?? That’s an absolutely ridiculous assertion.
Seriously. Obama beat Clinton without having to rely on a major scandal or implosion on her part. That should be ample evidence that the Democratic Party’s hold on the nominee is nowhere near as strong as it was in the 50s and 60s.
She’s talking to real, normal people, even if they are screened. Most high-power politicians talk to donors, Villagers, and other high-power politicians. That’s very much a bubble and she’s hearing things from outside it, like the mental health business.
Let me know when she offers up a policy proposal.
Rand Paul is out there talking up Clinton’s hypocrisy on this issue. Am sure his fanboys will fail to notice that Paul a) isn’t stating his position and b) has no policy proposal on this or much of anything else.
He’s stating his position, for those who hear it. I know I hear it:
And he ends with the usual:
No, the cops/police/systemic violence isn’t a “racial thing”, per se. However, your statement most certainly is; he knows it, I know it, and his targeted audience knows it.
If that’s his position, why doesn’t he get ordained and find a church? Good public policy can enhance existing functional personal behaviors and relationships, but it’s not up to government to decide what those are and can’t impose them even if they could be defined.
If one wants public policies that are completely counter-productive for the values they espouse, can’t do better than voting for Republicans.
Commenter Bazooka Joe had a good thought about this during Gingrich’s “run”:
Which brings me to this:
From Ferguson to Baltimore: The Fruits of Government-Sponsored Segregation
Imagine a Republican party that actually gave a shit about minority-owned small business lending, open housing markets and rigorous fraud protection?
Those are public policy issues. Libertarians don’t do public policy. Republicans prefer to limit them to putting a brick on the scale in favor of the elites. Modern Democrats think half a brick is fine should lead to some trickle down favors for others.
Missing fathers like Rand Paul? Didn’t his son just get arrested for DUI? And has been arrested a few times?
Isn’t the Paul kid about the same age as Freddie Gray was?
Charles Pierce referred to Paul’s response as a dive:
○ Incarceration of Drug Offenders – a Global Overview | Beckley Foundation UK | [pdf]
○ Rand Paul’s criminal justice challenge — on the campaign trail | WaPo |
○ Rand Paul op-ed after Ferguson – Politicians and failure War on Drugs to blame
In the wake of the Ferguson shooting, both Hillary Clinton and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican likely to run for president, suggested blacks were right to be skeptical of the American policing system.
“We cannot ignore the inequities that persist in our justice system, inequities that undermine our most deeply held values of fairness and equality, ” Clinton said in a speech.
[Source: Deep Racial Divide Remains Under Obama]In the 19 months since his proposal, Rand Paul has been completely ineffective in bringing his Senate Caucus to support sentencing reform or other policies which would shrink the wide chasm that exists between the policing policies administered in rich and poor communities.
And then, when manifestations of these misbegotten policies are delivered, over and over again, on the nation’s doorsteps, Rand Paul immediately does things like what he did this week by goes on a nationally syndicated radio show with the explicitly racist Laura Ingraham to heh-heh with her over a shared, explicitly racist point of view.
“I’m running for President, for Pete’s sake, I can’t be seen doing things which support the Black community!”
I would like to credit Rand for his (supposed) position here, but he is using literally zero political capital to advance his (supposed) position, so I cannot credit the Senator.
Up-voted to counter troll-rate.
The problem is not “mass incarceration”; it is incarceration — and other, lesser and greater, kinds of persecution using the forms of the law — of innocent persons.
The problem is not “race and justice”; it is the perception, which is essentially universal, that police and prosecutors must be unaccountable in order to do their jobs — and that if they are not seen as being infallible, the entire system will wink out of existence, like the last beat of a mayfly’s wings, and be supplanted at once by bloody anarchy.
I believe she cares about this topic. There’s a point, right around the fifteen minute mark, when the feel of this speech changes. It seems to change from an election speech to an explanation of what she personally believes in. Her demeanor changes. Even the reaction of the audience changes. And I believe her.
Call me naive if you want. One presidential candidate stood up and said we need to change the way we do things. She explained the origin of the problem. She discussed policies that would help. She seemed to genuinely care. Even if she isn’t your favorite politician (she isn’t mine), a speech like this deserves to be acknowledged and respected.
All these years there’s been a rumor, mostly but not entirely on the right, that Hillary is a closet liberal and has been biting her tongue for over a quarter century. I’ve always thought she was a little more liberal than her policy positions but the idea that somebody could hide their personal preferences so well for so long was pretty ridiculous. But yeah, watching that speech it does feel like she’s been holding something in a long time and she really does mean this.
There have been occasional flashes before – the “vast rightwing conspiracy” theory for which she was ruthlessly mocked even though she was spot-on-the-money-literally-correct – and the breakdown during the New Hampshire interview. Still not sure if the whole closet liberal business is true, but I certainly want her on criminal justice issues. Even over Sanders, who did vote to keep innocent teenagers locked up in Gitmo.
If she was really listening, she would have called upon us to rise up and expropriate the expropriators.
I’m guessing from the coverage she didn’t do this…
Well, if you pick your people carefully, you can hear what you want to hear at the moment. And what she wants to hear at the moment is how to win Iowa, New Hampshire, and some other key (for the Clintons) states — in the general election. I would suspect that the Clinton states in 1992 and 1996 that were lost 2000 and later are under the microscope as to whether that old Clinton magic will work again.
She hasn’t talked to me either, and I don’t depend on ESP from the base to influence candidates.
I’m pretty cynical about Clintons and the rest of the Democratic establishment too. The current appearances is that the Clintons realize that they must take back Congress if they are going to have a real chance to redo the Clinton presidency. And no doubt Bill has a visceral inclination to try to put the modern conservative Republican party out of business. The Congressional Democrats have failed to look after their own party’s interests in their waffling bipartisanship.
If the Clinton’s are going big, one wonders what the shape of the Democratic Party will look like if they succeed in winning. Might we possibly have competent Wall Street elites again who understand the social origins of their continued fabulous wealth? You know, Rockefeller and Lindsay and Javitts Republicans. Kennedy and Rockefeller Democrats. That is the only way the powers that be can arrest the current slide toward internal chaos and international disaster.
If she is really listening, that is good. If the Clintons are going for a dem congress on this, that also is good. I wasn’t encouraged by her phrasing “shared prosperity” re: growing income inequality, but hoping that Sanders in the race will push her. Just to note, since it’s our weekly Hillary discussion, that Carne Ross’s twitter mentions Morocco re: money and influence and Clinton foundation – https://twitter.com/carneross/status/591002621701394435
“Shared prosperity” tested better in focus groups than “liquidating the kulaks”
yes, I imagine so [nice one, Davis X]