hillary clinton, over and over: "I don't pay much attention to polls." i guess polls aren't polling well. it's the completely routine dishonesty, the continual falsehood of the self-presentation, that's so annoying. meanwhile the polls are freaking the clinton people out utterly, and she's scrambling left hour by hour to short-circuit bernie. so let me ask you this, do you care what someone says about immigration raids, or what they actually believe? because what they believe is surely a better predictor of what they will actually do when in office, for example. but ever since maybe 1992, we've been well beyond that; the first problem isn't whether bill clinton, al gore, john kerry, hillary clinton honestly represent their beliefs in public space; the first question is whether they have any beliefs at all or have transcended the whole idea. (oh, just to remind you: kerry ran a pro-war campaign in 2004: "John Kerry reporting for service!" he tried to run to bush's right, the old clinton approach. al gore never talked about climate change in 2000, instead he stuck to a handful of focus-grouped phrases, such as the idea that bush had a "risky scheme" for social security: he used the phrase literally hundreds of times, like some sort of mechanical playback device or wind-up toy, a round dozen in any given debate.)
say hillary is the nominee. expect her to try to get to ted cruz's right, ok? on national security, to start with, anti-terrorist fear-mongering etc. there will be little talk of guns or immigration, and stunning inaction in all areas in the skull-crushing clinton admin #2. if there are two viable candidates in the general election (for example, trump and clinton) then in the usual manner there will be little incentive for clinton to talk about, for example, immigration, or criminal justice reform: she will have the black and latino vote locked up and will start trying to pry out moderate independents. because she has no particular commitments, she will make this shift easily, with no conscientious qualms. this is how problems in minority communities grow ever-worse under democratic administrations. and on the day she is elected - which i think is unlikely - hillary will start running for re-election. please, let's not.
1992-2015 was the era of political discourse utterly divorced from all real-world content. i always thought it would be so easy to blow that shit up: all you had to do was appear as the actual human being you are in public space, and all that required was a kind of minimal human courage, the sort we all need to muster every day. anyway, trump has blown through that slop like a bullet through a blancmange. i hope he's never president. but i hope we never return to the mind-numbing yipyap.
the hillary idea is that you just say anything that sounds good; your only goal in communication, or in your political career, is to manipulate people to serve your little ego. in the process, paradoxically, you become a non-being: whose ego is that ego? it's like it's become its own entity, displacing the person from hillary clinton's body. i'll say this again, there has been a whole theory of communication according to which the only goal of the whole thing is to get people to do what you want them to do, a model perhaps drawn from advertising. and then there's the sort-of pomo idea that the world is whatever we can persuade each other it is, to the point where you think that saying all day that you're winning the war makes it more likely that you will win the war, even while your'e getting your ass kicked. the question is how to 'frame' reality for people, to construct for them a world. that is a real good formula for being mugged all the time, over and over, disastrously, by actuality.
and the question of the frame and similar approaches to communication has been dedicated to nothing except destroying your enemies. it's all been for partisan advantage, to get rid of the other party. it's individually self-serving, but it's collectively self-serving: it is dedicated to extruding your enemies from your reality, making them evil, stupid, anachronistic, without regard to any actual policy goals. it is fucking pathetic, but now we can see how it might be over.
