In accepting Hillary’s Clinton’s call to serve as Vice President today at a Miami rally, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine shone a moving light onto his soul that was anything but boring.
Growing up as a Jesuit educated social justice Catholic in a working class family from Kansas City , Missouri he experienced a similar Midwestern spiritual journey with Methodist Hillary Clinton from suburban Chicago.
As a child he recalled his mother explaining to him the difference between a pessimist and an optimist. She said : ” A pessimist wants to be right. An optimist wants to do right. Dedicate your life to do as much good as you can for the most people.”
For me, that sums up the difference between Trump / Pence and Clinton / Kaine.
As a lifelong optimist sign me up with the later. Kaine is able. I’m with them !
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Part of the challenge for this ticket is that too many Americans still feel left behind by this recovery and are inclined to blame the current administration. Too many Americans feel vulnerable to radical extremists of all stripes and are inclined to blame the current administration.
So articulating a positive governing agenda that builds on the last 8 years while also moving decisively past them to a new era is essential to winning this campaign. Doom and gloom can’t win a presidency unless people feel frightened as they did in 68′ and 80′. Hillary has to have her own agenda like Bill Clinton or Obama that breaks with the past as well as builds on it.
Most Americans were indeed left behind after eight years of the Obama Administration. The “rebound” went to Wall Street and people who vacation in the Hamptons, can afford $600 haircuts, and who have $10 Mill apartments in Manhattan….the rest of us? Well, as long as we vote for “moderate” or “third way” or “the money has to come from somewhere and I don’t care where Democrats”….this will be our fate.
… I do not agree with the implication that this obscene wealth concentration is happening as a result of “eight years of the Obama Administration”.
It is a result of structural changes in tax policy that have been occurring ever since JFK cut taxes- a mistake. The big radical acceleration was with the massive Reagan tax cuts. Then very little good happened in tax policy ever since with a few minor exceptions. So to just throw Obama’s name out there when it is the House that sets tax policy? Nope. Not fair. We wanted Bernie. We didn’t get him. But do not blame Obama.
I agree with this comment so enthusiastically that I posted a new diary rather than respond here.
The dramatic rise in wealth and income concentration we see is the direct consequence of the misguided “free market” dogma too many of us — of BOTH parties — have been advocating since the Reagan era.
We absolutely MUST restore confiscatory tax policies that clawback wealth from the top one percent and redistribute it to the 99%. A good and simple benchmark is the GINI coefficient of wealth and income — Congress could and should pass legislation requiring that tax policy be set to make the GINI coefficient of wealth and income no more than that of the EU (30.6 in 2012).
Our 2007 Gini coefficient was an embarrassing 45.0 in 2007, and it’s surely gotten worse since then.