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“A stink bomb into liberals’ certainty”: Doug Henwood on his anti-Clinton crusade
I never got caught up in the 2008 Obama mania. I was very skeptical; I thought he was going to be something of a neoliberal Democrat of one sort of another, and I didn’t understand why people were projecting all these great progressive characteristics onto him. I could understand people wanting to believe, but I just didn’t see [him] as the man for the job (and I certainly feel vindicated by the outcome).
I think people voted for Obama in 2008 with the hope that they were going to be getting in some sense a more peaceful, egalitarian world. And they didn’t, really. They got a very Wall Street-friendly president who is also perfectly happy with conducting drone assassinations and expanding the so-called war on terror — institutionalizing it, according to James Risen. Most people who voted for Obama didn’t expect that.
...
I think she’s very much a Midwestern Methodist — a real straight-arrow, kind of austere, great believer in self-reliance … She urged Bill [Clinton] to end welfare back in ’96, and part of the reason for that, I think, is that she has that Midwestern Protestant work ethic and she somehow thought poor women would be better off thrown to the mercy of the job market than ending up on welfare …
She flirted with Saul Alinsky’s [ideas] as an undergraduate; she wrote her senior thesis about him. But even in the thesis, she was much more an “inside the system” kind of woman than Alinsky would have been. And as she got older, she moved more and more deeply into the system; she went to law school and then … ended up doing corporate law, defending banks and utilities and things like that.
She went from a youthful semi-radicalism (she was never a real ’60s radical) to a sort of early-middle-aged conservatism, at least in style and temperament, pretty quickly.
Full interview: http://www.salon.com/2014/10/24/a_stink_bomb_into_liberals_certainty_doug_henwood_on_his_anti_clinton_crusade
I think people voted for Obama in 2008 with the hope that they were going to be getting in some sense a more peaceful, egalitarian world. And they didn’t, really. They got a very Wall Street-friendly president who is also perfectly happy with conducting drone assassinations and expanding the so-called war on terror — institutionalizing it, according to James Risen. Most people who voted for Obama didn’t expect that.
...
I think she’s very much a Midwestern Methodist — a real straight-arrow, kind of austere, great believer in self-reliance … She urged Bill [Clinton] to end welfare back in ’96, and part of the reason for that, I think, is that she has that Midwestern Protestant work ethic and she somehow thought poor women would be better off thrown to the mercy of the job market than ending up on welfare …
She flirted with Saul Alinsky’s [ideas] as an undergraduate; she wrote her senior thesis about him. But even in the thesis, she was much more an “inside the system” kind of woman than Alinsky would have been. And as she got older, she moved more and more deeply into the system; she went to law school and then … ended up doing corporate law, defending banks and utilities and things like that.
She went from a youthful semi-radicalism (she was never a real ’60s radical) to a sort of early-middle-aged conservatism, at least in style and temperament, pretty quickly.
Full interview: http://www.salon.com/2014/10/24/a_stink_bomb_into_liberals_certainty_doug_henwood_on_his_anti_clinton_crusade