Reply #51: That may be so... to a degree. [View All]

Nuanced answers are often more truthful than simple ones. How many people here are so enamored of the Edwards pledge to make Congress give up their insurance if they don't give the same coverage to everybody else? The thing is, it sounds good, but it's bullshit. The President can't do that. Same with not taking the lobbyist money. There are lots of lobbyists who aren't corporate whores, and failing to make that distinction is just pandering and political b.s. The simple answer is just wrong sometimes.

Hillary is giving nuanced answers to complex issues, which is hard to do in the sound bite arena we've created for these candidates. As long as we keep insisting on ridiculously simple answers to complicated issues, we'll keep getting empty headed but "strong" candidates who don't really have to know what they are talking about, only what triggers an emotional response in people. We can do better. We reject so much else of the Bush syndicate, but this to me is the essence of it. They don't care about policy, or truth, or progress. They only seem to care about profit and winning. They will say anything to win, and that usually means fear or greed. Simple answers that people have a hard time resisting, but ultimately don't help solve our problems. We can do better.

To the extent that Hillary, or any other candidate for that matter, dances around certain questions, I don't think it should be a surprise to anyone that some questions are volatile, the country is divided, candidates have to win the nomination before they can compete in the general, and therefore they will try to avoid making answers that half the country currently disagrees with. It's the same as saying "we'll deal with this later". A "time out" if you will. Some work has to be done before we can arrive at a reasonable solution for some problems.

Someday in the future we may have a more progressive country, but right now there is no evidence that a strongly progressive candidate can win on a national level. Let's face it, half the country is conservative. The main reason Dems are looking so good right now is not because we've convinced them that our way is the right way. It's because the current Republicans are self-destructing. It's not a philosophical issue. It's just corruption and incompetence. It's an opportunity for us, but we could easily overplay this into defeat. Save the philosophical purity tests for your volunteer work with the ACLU and Planned Parenthood and poverty assistance. This is presidential politics and everybody gets to play, even those who disagree with us.

The thing is though, you might not like the more direct answers we will get in the GE. The candidate will need some swing votes, and many of those, by definition, are not going to be particularly progressive. We just don't get to vote for "candidate A" vs. "pure progressivism". We only get to vote for a Dem vs. a Repub. in a more European system, we would have more parties and we would at least get to be part of a coalition, but here it's all or nothing. If we get more direct answers in the GE from a Dem candidate, it is more likely those answers will be farther to the right than we would like, and they probably should be if we want the Dem to win, so long as they are to the left of the Repub candidate.