A Choice Not an Echo
By 
As Hillary Clinton noted last Friday in a speech to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, this election is not like previous presidential contests. It “isn’t about the same old fights between Democrats and Republicans. … This election,” Clinton said, “is profoundly different.”
She isn’t kidding.
Even before the horror of the Orlando shooting unleashed a new wave of poisonous rhetoric, last week looked and sounded like no other in American political history. And in some ways the least remarkable thing about it was the fact that Clinton became the first woman to win the nomination of a major party for the presidency. The turn from the primaries into the general election has already included political battles that are bolder and less mealy-mouthed, cruder and more chilling than any we’ve seen for decades; it is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. There is no taming of the Republican who ostensibly staked out extreme positions to grab attention in the primary; there is no pivot to the center from the Democrat supposedly pulled to the left by her primary rival. Democrats and Republicans are making issues of identity and inclusion central to their campaigns, both symbolically and in terms of policy. The contest we’re entering feels ever more like a civil war.
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But it’s not just about optics. Given that Warren is now “with her,” and spent part of her time on Maddow talking about battling the big banks and expanding Social Security, this pairing offers the promise of friendly pressure on Clinton to stay left.
Clinton’s speech to Planned Parenthood on Friday indicated that she plans to. For years, Democrats, including Clinton herself, have pussy-footed around abortion, staying away from the word itself and distancing themselves from the issue, walling off reproductive rights as a social distraction, a single issue, a women’s issue … as some pesky skirmish in a culture war.
So it mattered that Clinton’s first speech after securing the nomination, at the moment when it is traditional for politicians to pivot toward the center, was to the organization that has been most regularly and thoroughly attacked by Republicans and members of the tea party during the Obama administration.
In her speech, Clinton did use the word abortion, again and again, and she reiterated one of the most progressive of her primary positions — her opposition to the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funds from being used for abortion — laying out exactly how it contributes to economic inequality and disadvantages women of color.
Clinton also drew out the ways that reproductive rights intersect with other progressive imperatives, including raising the minimum wage, guaranteeing paid family leave and affordable day care, ensuring equal pay, passing comprehensive immigration reform, addressing systemic racism, and passing gun-control measures.
I obviously would never defend HEIGHTEN THE CONTRADICTIONS third party wankery, but in the context of 2000 (Democratic president that signed some terrible legislation while shifting to the center, previous Republican president a non-disaster) I can at least understand it. In 2016 — with a Democratic candidate following up on less than one year of effective Democratic control of the government producing a series of progressive reforms with few peers in American history opposing a Republican Party thoroughly controlled by reactionary radicals and headed by a bluntly racist and authoritarian maniac — it’s just embarrassing, puerile, inhumane.
Indeed, this has to be the starkest ex ante choice the American electorate has faced in a federal election since Reconstruction, right? In 1964 the differences between the presidential candidates might have been greater but the congressional parties were far closer. 1932 was huge in retrospect but less so during the campaign.
…on reflection, I’ll concede 1932 (massive in retrospect) and 1936 (extremely stark during the campaign.) 2016 will in any case be one of the starkest choices ever faced by the American voters in a federal election.