Recycling Hillary

Glenn McCoy had a pretty good political cartoon mocking Hillary Clinton. Click and take a look. It shows a recycling paper bin with her shredded emails and another one marked “IDEAS.” Predictably, she’s in the latter box looking like either she fell or someone tossed her in. McCoy, whose occasionally sharp eye is tuned rightward, is echoing the line that the GOP has ginned up. There’s nothing new here, folks. All of HRC’s ideas, proposals, positions, political philosophies, you name it, are old and “recycled.”

The interesting part of this is that they’re right. The really fun part of it is that this is actually good, very good.

Hillary’s position on social issues like abortion, gay rights, marriage equality, immigration, a progressive tax structure, women’s issues, income inequality, education and similar issues are pretty much straight progressive and liberal. Some are old (education) some are actually pretty new (gay rights).

Similarly with environmental and science-oriented issues like climate change, funding for basic research, protecting natural resources, preserving national parks and shorelines. Here we find her again siding with the left and, yes, virtually all these positions are “old.” None of them are bad.

She’s also pretty good on issues like holding fast on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the ACA or Obamacare — I’ve decided I like calling it that. It immortalizes him for this accomplishment and turns the tables on the GOP toadies who started using it as a slur. Some of these programs are old, others very new. And, for those who’ve forgotten, Hillary was instrumental in passing CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program).

Where Hill (ever notice — the more familiar someone becomes, the more we tend to shorten their names) starts looking less appealing is her tendency to drift toward the use of force a bit sooner and with less provocation than would seem wise and her unfortunate cozy links with the big money goons on Wall Street. Alas, she shares these with Obama.

Now is all this stuff just a bunch of “recycled” ideas? Yup, a lot of it is. But so what; they may be old ideas but, mostly, they’re good ones.

What the Republicans fear the most is that she will actually get to put some of these old, dusty ideas into practice. They’ve been rather successful at pushing these kinds of programs out of the spotlight and managed to make many “old” and effective principles look bad (e.g., unions). What they really worry about is that if she gets to enact these recycled ideas, the economy will fully recover, the unconscionable gap between the 1% and the rest of us will start to close, the minimum wage will move toward a level where you can actually live on it, unions will recover their clout, solid research into basic science will blossom — you know, all that stuff the GOP hates.

Unless she gets hit by a meteorite, she’s going to be the Democratic nominee. You don’t need a Ouija board for this. She’s also going to win the presidency. The only question is by how much and how long will her coattails be.

Jeb is the most likely opponent but he has liabilities — the main one being that the Tea Party crazies hate him and might stay home. The other one is that unfortunate last name. I can’t wait till the Dems pull out that quote from Mama Barbara when Jeb’s name was first floated a year or so ago. It was something like “I don’t think so. This country’s had enough Bushes in the White House.”

All the others are shallow pretenders (Walker, Rubio) or demagogues (Cruz) and will become unmasked as such during the campaign. The best hope is that the Democratic margin in ‘16 will be great enough to pull both the House and Senate back into their hands. Then Hillary can recycle all those old ideas — effectively, because she’s seen what a train wreck Obama’s continued efforts at bipartisanship produced.

Down with the new; let the old return — Hey, isn’t that the Conservative chant?