The Hill played it pretty straight with their coverage of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign rollout. She chose Roosevelt Island in the middle of New York City’s East River as her setting. This provided her with a few symbolic opportunities.
By choosing the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park as the site to kick off her second White House run, Clinton is trying to tie herself to the legacy of a third U.S. president and his wife Eleanor Roosevelt, one of her role models.
“President Roosevelt called on every American to do his or her part, and they answered,” said Clinton, standing on a massive stage molded in the form of her blue and red campaign logo.
“It’s America’s basic bargain – if you do your part, you ought to be able to get ahead,” she continued. “When everybody does their part, America ought to be able to get ahead too.”
You can also see the rebuilt World Trade Center from the island, which allowed her to remind people that she was serving as the junior senator from New York on September 11, 2001 and was in the Situation Room on the day that we found and killed Usama bin-Laden.
Other little details that are listed out in the article make it appear that the event was well thought out and went off without any hitches. The music was dominated by female vocalists and some of the bands were popular with the youth vote. A DREAMer appeared and made a speech.
And there was some value in the World Trade Center backdrop when she turned her speech to economic inequality, too.
The daughter of a housemaid and granddaughter of a Scranton, Pa., millworker, Clinton hit on populist themes throughout her speech, saying she wants to fight for all Americans.
“America can’t succeed unless you succeed,” she told throngs of supporters waving tiny American flags. “Democracy can’t be just for corporations and billionaires. It’s your time to secure gains and move ahead.
“That’s why I am running for president of the United States of America.”
In her roughly 45-minute speech, Clinton made only a passing reference to the battle over trade, which has divided Obama and congressional Democrats. And she continued to avoid taking sides in the intraparty spat.
“Advances in technology and the rise of global trade have created whole new areas of economic activity and opened new markets for our exports,” she explained, “but they have also displaced jobs and undercut wages for millions of Americans.”
You can be as cynical or as optimistic about all this as you want to be. For my part, I am at least pleased to see where she thinks she needs to take this campaign.
I’m always a little surprised to see any national politician embrace New York City. Growing up, I always got the sense that most of the country hated us and that it would be a bad idea to tell anyone you were from New York if you wanted them to like you. The aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was really the first time I ever got a sense that the greater country valued us at all. It was disorienting to see people congratulating us for our courage and unity and resolve because I’d never been complimented before in my life for where I came from. I almost resented it at first because it didn’t strike me as sincere.
So, I’m glad Hillary went right to the heart of the city to launch her campaign, and I could never complain about choosing Four Freedoms Park. Bill Clinton was there on the day in 2012 when the park was finally dedicated.
As a reminder, here are the Four Freedoms, as articulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union speech.
These became the rallying points for the nation as we confronted fascism in Europe and the Pacific.
The New York Times coverage focuses on her desire to close the income inequality gap. The Washington Post coverage has a more generic theme, describing Hillary as laying out a vision for a more “hopeful, inclusive America that takes care of its own while taking on big challenges such as climate change.”
My daughter’s very first job was as a park ranger in the Four Freedoms Park. It’s really a private park or something like that. It’s not part of the NPS or anything else. It is also the dumbest park I have ever seen. It’s about 4 acres of totally flat, totally paved over land on the Island. She was there for 8 hours a day and during the winter, it can get MOTHERFUCKING cold on that island. There is NO INSIDE SPACE for the park, except one little house where they sell stuff. Everything else is outside. Just you, 20-30 confused tourists there to try to understand what the park is all about, and the wind…
The fifth freedom is Freedom from Activity. Nothing to do at Four Freedoms Park.
It was a good speech. She and her advisers have been thinking hard about goals that are both inspiring and achievable and it shows. I liked the effort to tie it in to the long-term liberal movement and not just hit on current controversies.
Goal-speak isn’t the same as goals.
Anyone that has aspired to be POTUS for at least fifteen years would long ago have defined what they would want to accomplish if given the job, why, and how. That is if such a person’s aspirations were based on “TO DO” for the people and not “TO BE.”
This is a campaign launch, not a convention platform. She’s already put out a number of specific positions, including cop body cams, no jail time for minor drug offenses,and a number of immigration reform proposals. If the speech had been a list of specific policy recommendations it would have been dull and a dud.
She says she’ll be putting out specific proposals over the next few months. Iowa is 7 months off. If we get to Iowa without her having proposed a platform, then you can legitimately complain.
Convention platforms are virtually meaningless.
Like a good speech, a campaign launch should begin with the broad objectives and themes. Not a grab bag of small stuff regardless of how nice they may sound. Then proceed to the details, including proposed legislative and executive actions, during the course of the campaign. All of that is then consolidated and summarized in the convention platform.
Funny, that’s how FDR’s 1932 Democratic nomination speech went. Repeal the 18th Amendment, public works projects, eliminate government waste, farm aid.
Three of those four items are big and two of them are related socialist econ policies.
Here’s a current big thing that also echoes FDR.
“We must end the War on Drugs. As with this country’s experiment in banning alcohol, the War on Drugs hasn’t protected individuals and families from ravages of drug addictions. It’s built an expensive and unnecessary prison-industrial-complex that destroys lives and hopes. It has fostered an underground economy rife with drug pushers and criminals that depends on building and retaining a customer base of addicts. etc.
That’s exactly what she did. She put out a bunch of big goals and has promised to follow up with implementation later.
Like Nixon’s secret plan to win the War that he couldn’t give us details on. HRC == RMH as far as being a paranoid liar.
Is she going to tell us about her combat experience again?
Where did this bizarre Hillary=liar idea come from? She’s pretty honest about campaign promises, as was her husband. Bill ran as a centrist, and governed as a centrist. Hillary ran for Senate as a mainstream Democrat and voted as a mainstream Democrat. Now she’s running as, actually, a rather leftist Democrat – when there’s a slew of political reasons to run as one, and to govern as one – and suddenly she’s supposed to be dishonest. How is it, after 25 years of keeping campaign promises, the Clinton aren’t respected for what they are, honest campaigners?
Claiming she was under fire in Kosovo. I can’t forget that bald faced lie. Democrats assail Mark Kirk for claiming to be an Iraq War veteran, and rightly so, but are silent on Hilary’s claim to be a combat veteran.
That was such a big whopper that it verged on delusional.
No, Clinton didn’t run as a “centrist” in 1992. He did support NAFTA and made it sound reasonable enough to try it. Should have known better than to listen to a Governor from a small and poor state on an issue of international trade.
From someone unlike you and me who actually knows them:
When she blamed the “vast, right-wing conspiracy” for promulgating stories about Bill’s infidelities (mostly true) and she damn well knew it (ref. Bernstein’s Hillary Clinton biography).
Her Senate floor speech in advance of the Iraq War resolution was packed with lies.
All efforts to push forward on progressive policy are weighed down by the retrogressive regime change she represents. So many people out there are just emotionally unprepared for Jan. 2017, and so many are ready to believe Hillary will close the book on President Obama and erode his imprint and not expand his legacy.
She’s going to be zealously policed for any and all presumed microaggressions against the president, let alone acts of overt distancing. I don’t relish her conundrum. She’s trying to replace a Mandela, Vaclav Havel, Lula da Silva, etc. After trying to prevent his rise in the first place!
The policy items she was pushing were an infrastructure bank and pre-school education for all. And some sort of nebulous higher education aid scheme.
On foreign policy, she’s a hawk relative to Russia, Iran, and of course North Korea. Not sure what will be different or will arrest the militarization of US society.
Workmanlike event and speech. The press reports pick up on the essential moderation in tone of the speech.
She definitely wants to occupy the center, no matter where it moves to.
Better speechmaking by Hillary — not quite as much shouting into the mic to emphasize a point, more conversational tones.
I liked most of her points on DP as most came from a liberal position. But her FP stance — center-right-hawkish — worries me if followed up on in the WH (as opposed to being merely rhetorical to get to the WH, as in 1960 and JFK).
Very unfortunate characterizing of Russia as a traditional “threat” and lumping them with crazy totalitarian states like NKorea or the rigid theocracy of Iran. And Putin she referred to as an “adversary.”
I understand there may be no major political disadvantage, and maybe an upside, to such hawkish positioning by a Dem. It’s not going to get her unelected, and might be what’s needed to reassure some people worried about a woman Dem presiding over our foreign relations involving several tough foreign leaders. But tough public rhetoric cold war style is not going to budge the Russians and Putin an inch from their recent activities in Ukraine, and will only worsen tensions between the two countries.
Continuing Obama fp policy with NATO aggression towards Russia … selling arms in conflict zones, keeping boots off the group once policy resulted in disaster (Libya-Syria), not keeping the world safe. Not much different from Republican tenure in the White House and policy aligned with the massive Military-Industrial complex. Hillary will be a greater supporter of Israel than Obama, closing the gap with the Republican-Christian Evangelist crazies. Fortunately for the Democrats, it appears pope Francis will be a great asset – Explosive intervention by Pope Francis set to transform climate change debate . See my recent comment.
Slightly amusing that she’s junked the “I, I, I” of her 2008 campaign in favor of a variant of Obama’s “you.”
If Eleanor Roosevelt were really her role model, she wouldn’t be running for POTUS and spent decades being closely affiliated with the banksters. She would have been hanging out with progressives during her time as First Lady and not whined and cowered when subjected to criticism.
Government neo-liberal economic and neo-con foreign policies INCREASE income and wealth inequality. Neither of which she has rejected and her adoption of campaign speech like, “Advances in technology and the rise of global trade have created whole new areas of economic activity and opened new markets for our exports, but they have also displaced jobs and undercut wages for millions of Americans.” is the same shit sandwich that we’ve been served for over two decades during which time income/wealth inequality grew substantially.
The least — the least — she could have done was to call for the seizure of the commanding heights of the economy in the name of the workers.
As an earnest of good will. A door-opener.
It’s not much to ask, is it?
Then I could begin to think about voting for her.
Booman,
It could be that over the past few decades, the rest of America has New Yorkified. When you can buy a bagel with cream cheese in Phoenix, Arizona and a triangular slice of flat greasy pizza in Seattle, Washington, you can see evidence of the love of New York at least through the pallet and waistline. Add to the heady mix, Joe Pesci encouraging people in Lincoln, Nebraska to “forgeddabboudit,” and hipsters in Mobile, Alabama scouring used vinyl record bins for Ramones and New York Dolls rarities, and the city’s impact is obvious. And, as a native of Chicago, Illinois who grew up right next door to Hillary’s suburb, Park Ridge, I’ll gladly embrace many things New Yawk without any feelings of urban/cultural inferiority. What’s the alternative to accepting New York as the cultural behemoth, buck toothed Evangelical madness from the yellowing at the sear sucker suit collar, Republican Jesus crowd? A gated community with Koch Klown Klones with assault rifles with massive penis trucks and 5,000 Tee Vee cable channels to choose from? Outback Steakhouse cannot offer the intimacy of an independently onwed and operated Argentinian steakhouse thriving in Brooklyn. New Yorkers are in Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s estimation, “sponge worthy.”
New York has always been tremendously influential. That hasn’t stopped much of the rest of the country from despising New York even as they sing its songs, read its books, and eat its food. Indeed, part of the despite might come from fear of its influence.
I do think the polarization of the country makes a New York launch a lot less problematic. New York is no longer so much a unique part of America viewed askance by most of the rest. It’s now basically Blue Team Captain so half the country loves it and half hates it. The people who still despise New York aren’t going to be voting for Hillary anyway.
Thank you curtadams. You said what I said, but more economically.
In other words, Fuck the South.
Um, no. The point is those Southerners who reflexively hate New York won’t vote for Hillary anyway so launching in New York does her no harm with them. For the rest – well, it’s big, iconic, and increasingly admired among Democrats, plus there’s 9/11, so it’s probably good.
I expect to see Hillary campaign to win in Florida (OK, only sort Southern), Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, and support congressional candidate elsewhere as well. She’s not going to fuck the South – that’s the Republican’s job.
In High School Civics, we were taught a phrase, “Glittering Generalities”. Goes with “Bandwagon Effect”.
She’s just lubing the voters up.
I too was born and raised in New York. I left after high school and, like you, the first time I got approval around that heritage was after 9/11/01. But I never thought it insincere. I think people came to appreciate New York and New Yorkers because it was an act of war against the entire country and it caused people to feel a sense of unity with the city that took the blow. The accolades over being from New York did not last but since then I’ve experienced a much expanded sense of acceptance.
As for Hillary herself, I like that she’s framing her campaign in the language of the left. I don’t trust her not to tack back to the right if she thinks it in her interest to do so. I wasn’t a fan of her husband. But I think that these times dictate that she govern as a moderate liberal and the same is true for anyone else who assumes office. The Democratic coalition demands this. I don’t necessarily respect whatever’s in her heart of hearts but I’m not afraid of her sitting in the Oval Office. All the Republicans scare me to death.
As I’ve said before: who gives a crap what’s in her heart of hearts? All I care is that she knows what side her bread is buttered on.
Obama didn’t and he’s paying the price for his inadequate stimulus and bungling of the debt ceiling debacle. FDR, despite being the spearhead for American liberalism, was a deficit hawk through and through — and when he got cold feet on Keynesian economics thanks to listening to the idiotic blathering of centrists, he paid the price with his Roosevelt Recession. Did Hillary Clinton learn anything from blunders like that? Did Hillary Clinton learn anything from her own Iraq War vote? Did she learn anything from Bill Clinton’s recession he stabbed George W. Bush with?
If the answer to two out of three of those questions is yes then I’ll be satisfied with her candidacy. Otherwise, we’ll wait and see.
“FDR…was a deficit hawk through and through,” huh? Not quite, bub. While he accepted Congress’ move to pull in the spending reins in his second term, he not only pushed hard to get Congress to spend to finance the programs he wanted to run, Franklin actually ran for his first re-election on his deficit spending, quite explicitly so.
One of my favorite political speeches ever- FDR in Pittsburg’s Forbes Field, about a month from Election Day, 1936:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15149
“…To balance our budget in 1933 or 1934 or 1935 would have been a crime against the American people. To do so we should either have had to make a capital levy that would have been confiscatory, or we should have had to set our face against human suffering with callous indifference. When Americans suffered, we refused to pass by on the other side. Humanity came first….”.
Nonetheless, he attacked Hoover in his first election for squandering the surpluses and letting things get to a deficit. Roosevelt proposed reversing this, even in his nomination acceptance speech, through cutting government waste and programs.
Does this sound familiar to you? Sounds like boilerplate VSP blathering to me.
And he can whinge all he wants to about human suffering and deficits and how he really didn’t want to do what he did. When the chips came down, he initiated a recession despite what those fucking pointy-headed longhaired Keynesian academics told him to. Because big numbers are scary and the press was slamming him as being profligate and unserious and drowning future generations in debt.
How about that? Does that sound familiar?
Look, Roosevelt was a great President. However, the hagiography and liberal revisionism on the man is laughable at times. He was an above-average but not exceptional politician holding a great political hand who was nonetheless by-and-large constrained by conventional thinking despite being asked to deal with an extraordinary crisis. That counts for a lot, but there’s nothing magical and special about the man. If FDR was in Hillary’s position today with his pre-Presidency record and rhetoric and held him to the same standard we held her we’d suspect him of being a secret plutocratic sellout and/or a dumbass VSP centrist.
I’m happy you acknowledged my main point, and happy that he governed far to the left of how he campaigned in ’32. Of course, he had three straight Congresses which allowed him to do so, a crucial point.
The prime constructor and seller of the New Deal, a set of policies which were even more radically leftist before the Supreme Court ruled many of its programs unconstitutional and effectively canceled them, could hardly be called a leader significantly “constrained by conventional thinking.” That FDR committed the nation to such a radical change in governing policies while seeing to it that his Congressional supermajorities were grown in both ’34 and ’36, all while millions continued to suffer mass unemployment and deprivation, certainly speaks well to his political skills.
Yes, I’m aware of the late 30’s austerity and recession, and aware of many other failings of his. Even you’re conceding Roosevelt was a great President. You bear witness to the fact that one doesn’t have to enter into hagiography in order to recognize his important contributions to good governance.
To supplant the “if I can’t be POTUS, I’ll keep telling Americans why they screwed up” McCain as the go-to guy for the Sunday talkies.
Mitt Romney gives a brutal PowerPoint critique of Obama’s foreign policy
There are many better adjectives than “brutal” that could be used to describe Mitt’s PowerPoint presentation. Such as inane, sophomoric, moronic. Essentially, a PowerPoint version of McCain’s “bomb, bomb, bomb” refrain. (Or maybe he was offering to sell his PowerPoint presentation to the highest bidder among the current wannabe POTUS folks kissed Mitt’s ring this weekend.)
From the man that supported the $4 trillion invasion of Iraq:
Not one of those three items would make my list as “consequential mistakes.” Or even mistakes. An authentic “reset” with Russia would have been a huge positive step forward.
Mitt had a chance to be a gracious loser — but no, he persists in reminding us why we rejected him and want him to just go away.
I suspect Romney’s Plan A is to be the go-to guy at a brokered GOP convention. Plan B is Secy of State under a Pres Walker. Plan C is Ambassador to France under Pres Jeb.
And he’s really gone too far with the cheap shot at RT, quickly becoming one of my favorite cable channels, and a necessary antidote to the anti-Russia/Putin story line in most of the MSM. As one Russia expert has noted, there wasn’t this much unchallenged anti-Russian leader propaganda in the US media even in the worst years of the Cold War.
Plan A may be a draft Romney groundswell as the GOP debate traveling roadshow makes “Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo” look like the more intelligent and scinntillating “Reality TV” offering or “The Daily Show” need do nothing more run GOP debate clips to fill its half hour programming.
A brokered convention is a wet dream, not a plan.
Are the Kochs dumb enough to choose Mitt for Walker’s SOS? What countries would welcome his after his performance in the UK — described as ‘Romneyshambles’, ‘party-pooper’, ‘worse than Palin’ – British papers are unimpressed by Republican’s charm offensive.
France has already experienced Romney living temporarily in their country — and don’t want him back. Plus, imbibing wine is a requirement for this posting. Maybe he should aim for KSA. He and his ancestors have more in common with the al-Saud family than any other.
” He and his ancestors have more in common with the al-Saud family than any other. “
You hit a grandstand home run.
I wonder who donated multi hundred thousand $$ to the Clinton Foundation to get that into the speech
I thought you were from Princeton NJ.
In ancient times New Jersey evoked even more empathy (and ridicule) than New York across the country. The New Jersey part may have even gotten worse. New York’s improved reputation became established by the numerous television programs and movies about it and its glamorous people, whether negative or positive. The USA-ians had to be positive about New York after 9/11. Cheney patriotically embraced everything that could further his power and war lust, and New York then fitted the bill beyond his wildest dreams: NYC suddenly became America!
So did I. 🙂