Hillary Forced to Retrench

A major news story about the Democratic primary campaign may have slipped by a lot of folks.

It's more or less in the article below from the New York Times. The Times story is a bit disorganized, but nevertheless the emergent picture is of a Hillary Clinton campaign forced to retrench nationally, even to writing off New Hampshire, in order to salvage a win in Iowa. It also appears she needs an infusion of $50 million to restore her campaign presence in the other states, having dismantled the entire prior national effort in favor of defending Iowa.

This is a dramatic turn of events.

How did things get so bad for Hillary?

She's simply not a candidate for these times. Just as she still has a Cold War mentality about Russia and wants American boots on the ground in Syria in spite of our Iraq debacle, she thinks she can win a nomination by the old rules: fat cat donors, party establishment endorsements, playing to the old-time Democratic sectors. And she apparently has no comprehension that the internet has changed everything. She doesn't understand that everything she has said and done is at our fingers tips. Also she has learned nothing from losing in 2008. She still thinks she can treat her opponent dismissively as being "a fairy tale", as Bill labeled the young Obama in 2008.

So she sneers at Bernie Sanders for not setting forth details of his universal health care proposal. Hey, Hillary, he isn't handing us draft legislation. He's announcing a vision of what we should go for. That's the proper role of a leader: vision. Bernie Sanders is a man of vision, just as Obama was, and that is what people want. Now as in the past:

1968: quoting George Bernard Shaw, Bobby Kennedy said, "There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

1961: John Kennedy: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

1963: Martin Luther King: "I have a dream."

Even Ronald Reagan, who was not in the same league as the above three, understood a people's need for a vision and talked of a shining city on a hill and a new morning in America.

Some people think these kinds of appeals are pandering. No, they are not. People have a right to turn their faces to the warmth of the sun. Lincoln knew it. Teddy Roosevelt knew it. FDR knew it.

For many people life is hard. They need and deserve a dream, a vision. And sometimes they need a pledge of change. That's what Bernie Sanders is offering, particularly to young people who hardly see a future, who are drowning in college debt, who understand what global warming means.

If the young cannot dream, we are a lost people.

Now, here's the big story from the New York Times. After you've read it, consider that the truly misguided dreamer in all this was Hillary Clinton, who thought she could easily snare a presidential entitlement by inheriting it from her husband. Sorry, Hillary, that's not the stuff from which true dreams are made.

http://www.nytimes.com/…/hillary-clinton-readies-for-a-long…