2. Earl Ofari Hutchinson

    The race for White House is effectively over. Hillary Clinton will be the 45th president of the U.S. The question now is what can Americans expect from a Clinton White House.  She has laid out pages after page of policy wonk positions on civil and women’s rights, civil liberties, taxes, jobs, the economy, health care, education, military preparedness, combatting terrorism, on her campaign website. Most of them are the almost obligatory positions that Democratic presidential candidates have taken on the big-ticket issues.

    However, it’s one thing to spell out an agenda on paper and another to get any of it through. She’ll almost certainly kick things off by trying to make good on the pledge that she made in a speech at a Michigan auto and aircraft parts manufacturing plant near Detroit in August, 2016. She promised a big spending plan to the tune of nearly $300 billion on a vast array of infrastructure building and repair projects; roads, bridges, airports schools, sewer systems and so on. The projects would create new jobs for thousands.

    Clinton made it clear that she expects the rich to foot much of the bill by demanding hefty tax hikes on them. She added the final FDR touch to her big spending plan by promising to plop the legislation on Congress’ table within her first 100 days in office.

    Clinton knows full well the perils ahead. The biggest threat is the Congress that she’ll have to go to with her big spending package. A GOP-controlled Congress will be as hostile to her big budget and tax increases as it was to Obama’s.



    With a big White House win, Clinton is on far more solid ground when she tries to follow through with the pledge. This will give her the breathing space needed to get parts of her jobs, education, health care, and infrastructure overhaul programs through.

    A Democratic take back of the Senate is absolutely a must be when it comes to the Supreme Court. Arizona Senator John McCain has openly saber rattled for the GOP to block any Clinton high court pick. Clinton almost certainly will have the chance to pick one, two, or even three, more justices to the bench. The judges she will choose will be in the mold of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. They will not be radical ideologues of the left. They will be judges with long standing court experience, solid legal credentials, and the highest ratings from the ABA and other legal groups. They will deliver safe and predictable votes on everything from women’s and civil rights to stemming environmental abuses.

    Clinton can’t and won’t try to avoid the problem that has been perennially the single biggest tormenting lightening rod for black-white discord, namely, wanton police violence against blacks and minorities, and the astronomical numbers of blacks in America’s jails and prisons.

    Her Oval Office to-do list is a mix of old and new proposals on police and criminal justice reform. They will meet with a wall of intense opposition, stonewalling or disregard by conservative Democrats and GOP state legislators, and congresspersons, police and prison unions, victim rights groups. To get one or more of her justice initiatives through Congress she’ll need a lot of help from Democrats within and without Capitol Hill. She’ll get lots of help here from civil rights groups, and criminal justice reformers.

    Clinton’s policies on foreign affairs, military security, the fight against terrorism and checking Iran’s nuclear ambition, will be more muscular than Obama’s. She won’t send in troops to Syria. But she’ll be tough on sanctions, and enforcing a no-fly zone there. She will do back with weapons and logistical support any faction that purports to be any kind of real alternative, with a pronounced tilt toward the U.S., to ISIS and the Assad regime. She’ll rigorously monitor Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal, cut not a penny from US military financial backing to Israel, while making the obligatory nod on paper to a Palestinian state. She will take the hardest of hard lines on Russia’s saber rattle in Eastern Europe and other hot spots. But this is still a far cry from a big ramp up in the US military presence in Iraq or Afghanistan as Obama did.



    President Clinton will be pulled and tugged at by corporate and defense industry lobbyists, the oil and nuclear power industry, government regulators, conservative family values groups, conservative GOP senators and house members, foreign diplomats and leaders, and in turn LGBT, women, civil rights and liberties, and environmental watchdog groups. They all have their priorities and agendas and all will vie to get White House support for their pet legislation, or to kill or cripple legislation that threatens their interests.

    Clinton’s entire political history if anything has shown that she will keep a firm, cautious and conciliatory eye on American public opinion when it comes to her making policy decisions and determining priorities. That’s what presidents, all presidents must do, and President Clinton will be no different.

    Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of What We Can Expect from President Hillary Clinton (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.
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  3. Earl Ofari Hutchinson

    A few minutes into the first presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Clinton did the very thing that I cringe at and hoped she would not do. She went after Trump on a point about jobs and their alleged loss to China, Mexico, and just about everywhere else you can think of but here. If she hadn’t gone on the attack, Trump sooner or later would have. They were off to the races after that. The debate then quickly turned into a football scrub match with fans of the teams cheering lustily when the home team scores; meaning their candidate getting a one-up, dig, hit, or smirky wise crack about their opponent. By then a debate that presents a real, in-depth, laying out of the candidate’s position on a crucial issue has completely gone off the rails. For the audience, the moderator, the millions that tune in, the debate is now a travelling circus filled with a mad grab for showy sound bites, and hit points against each other, with all those watching and waiting with baited anticipation and merriment for that moment.
    Even in the best of circumstances, presidential debates are little more than high camp reality TV since it’s been long established that most voters say they don’t learn much from the debates, and that they aren’t going to change who they’re going to vote for anyway. If they planned to vote for Clinton before she pursed her lips to take a whack at Trump, nothing she could say or do would change that. If they planned to vote for Trump before he pursed his lips to take a whack at Clinton, nothing he could say or do on the big stage would change that. Party affiliation, long-standing political preferences, personal beliefs and values insure that.
    The problem is it’s those whacks that Clinton and Trump spent most of their time honing to get that precious cheer and got cha’ thrill from their partisans. This is no accident. This sad, sorry state of what presidential debates have been reduced too goes beyond just a pander to political thrill seeking, negativism, and of course, personal attack attack attack. It’s built-in to the whole deeply flawed, scripted, and rigidly manipulated structure of presidential debates. The debates are run by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is just another way of saying the Republican and Democratic Party, and a stellar crew of their top gun, senior party officials. The Commission’s Board of Directors is composed of the nation’s big names financial and political elites. The debate sponsors have been some of the top corporations such as At&T, Ford, J.P. Morgan and other financial bigwigs.
    The two parties have a monumental and rigidly vested interest in making sure that their party standard bearers don’t stray one sentence from well-rehearsed, and ad nausea repeated talking points, sound bites, and hit their opponent in the kisser one-liners. The candidates, to no surprise, know the rules of engagement and adhere to them. Yes, Trump may bloviate here and there, and even seem to go off the deep end, but it’s still well-within the prescribed bounds of pat one-liners, and regurgitating his worn talking points. The format doesn’t allow for anything else.
    There’s no lengthy response time to permit Trump or Clinton to flesh out their position on say health care, or job creation, as opposed to simply attacking in a one-liner each other’s one-liner on these issues. They have no chance to ask each other open-ended questions on their position on the issues. There’s no aggressive push to get the candidates to plunge to the depth on a specific policy issue.
    That takes time, and it’s time the candidates don’t have because that time has been cut in half to two minutes from the more than four minutes’ presidential candidates had in debates in years past to respond to a question. An attempt was made to partially address this gaping flaw by dividing the debates into several 15-minute blocks to permit the candidates a response and follow-up debate on an issue. This did nothing to force candidates to move a sentence or an extra thought from their script.
    Countless proposals have been made to get a hard-hitting moderator seasoned on the issues, or turn the questioning over to a panel of experts from academia, labor, the arts, and business, or even having the questions come from a nationwide pool of questions drawn up by citizens themselves. This way you’d likely get questions on topics that almost never get asked such as combatting poverty, homelessness, mass incarceration, the failed drug war, what kinds of judges to pick for the federal courts and Supreme Court, student debt, what to do about “Too Big to Fail” banks, the why and wherefore of drone attacks, the Palestinian question, specific plans to deal with climate change, and a myriad of other issues either ignored, or given short shrift.
    These proposals to give the American people real, free-wheeling, issue driven presidential debates, void of personal digs, canned spiels, and punchy one-liners have gone nowhere. Until they do I won’t be watching anymore presidential debates.

    Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of How “President” Trump will Govern, (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.
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  6. Earl Ofari Hutchinson
     GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump upped the ante again on arguably the single biggest campaign issue that has Trump and Clinton backers the most anxious about. That’s who gets to appoint who to the Supreme Court during the next four to eight years. There could be anywhere from two to four vacancies in that time span. Trump upped the ante in three ways. The first was when he again tossed out the name of the late Antonin Scalia during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
    This was not simply a double down on his praise of Scalia as the judge who along with Clarence Thomas is at the top of his High Court hero’s list. It sent the strongest signal that his picks will not just be garden variety strict constructionists, but activists and influencers on the bench. They will be judges who won’t just base their rulings on the standard conservative playbook, but will cajole, hector, and badger other judges to toe the hard conservative line in their rulings. And who will have the gall when it suits their purpose not even to try and hide it. Scalia was the textbook example of this kind of judge. He didn’t even try to make a constitutional cover for his court push to give Florida to Bush in the 2000 election. As he famously and shamelessly said that "the only issue was whether we should put an end to it, after three weeks of looking like a fool in the eyes of the world."
    Scalia played that part to the max. Nowhere was that on more stunning display then for the two decades that he served as the court schoolmaster for Thomas. Along the way, he insured that the other justices looked hard over their shoulders at him when they huddled to craft an opinion in a case. It was no accident that with Scalia gone from the court it looks and even sounds like an almost moderate court on some of its rulings on abortion rights, affirmative action, voting rights and the feds paying for contraceptives at religious bent hospitals.  The outcome would have almost certainly been different if Scalia had been there.
    GOP Vice Presidential contender Mike Pence made the Trump-Scalia axis official when he vowed to a campaign crowd in Michigan that Trump’s High Court pick would hit the bench with the practically sworn duty to slam down the curtain on Roe v. Wade. This was tantamount to promising to say to heck with law, prior rulings, or deliberations, the judge would just knock out abortion rights period. Pence didn’t stop there. He repeatedly tossed out the mantra that Trump will appoint strict constructionists in his appointments and not just for a Scalia type judicial hit on abortion rights. This was a prime advertisement for unapologetic conservative judicial activism in the cookie cutter mold of a Scalia.
    Trump didn’t publicly drop Scalia’s name at the convention solely because he considered him the judge with the right stuff. It was the one name that he knew above all others who was considered a demi-god among party ultra-conservatives, pro-lifers and evangelicals. They have from time to time voiced big doubts about Trump’s less than stout conservative pronouncements about abortion, planned parenthood, religious values, and law and public policy decisions as translated by the courts. With the non-endorsement of him at the convention by their shining knight Ted Cruz, this makes it even more imperative for Trump to send the signal that he will move mountains to find and nominate Scalia type activist judges to the High Court.
    In decades past, many Democratic and Republican-appointed justices have scrapped party loyalties and based their legal decisions solely on the merit of the law, constitutional principles and the public good. Scalia was a judicial horse of a different color. The tip-off that judges like him would vote their ideology rather than the law came from George W. Bush. On the presidential campaign trail in 2000, Bush was asked if elected what kind of judge he’d look for and nominate. He didn’t hesitate. He pledged to appoint “strict constructionists” to the court and specifically named Thomas, Scalia and William Rehnquist as the judges that perfectly fit that description. By then the three had already carved out a hard line niche as three of the most reflexive, knee-jerk, reactionary jurists to grace the court in decades. Their votes to torpedo, water down, eviscerate or erode rights on all issues from abortion to civil rights were so predictable they could have been mailed in.
    A Supreme Court judge can sit on the court for years even decades and watch as legions of Republicans and Democrats come and go in Congress and the White House. Scalia certainly did. All the while, they are shaping and remaking law and public policy for decades to come with their votes, rulings and opinions. Trump may not know much else but he knows that a few more Scalias on the bench will insure that the High Court does just that, and his way.

    Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of How “President” Trump will Govern, (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.
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  7. Earl Ofari Hutchinson
    Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has five challenges she faces in her acceptance speech. Not one of them has to do with her GOP rival Trump. The first is personal, very personal. She has to make people want to vote for her not just because she’s the most savvy, experienced, prepared, and knowledgeable about foreign and domestic policy issues, which she is. But because they like her. Unfortunately, her unlikeability rating runs dangerously close to that of Trump. The difference is that Trump’s dislike numbers have been high from day one, Clinton’s have edged up steadily during the course of the campaign. And that’s especially worrisome.
    The importance of the likeability factor in politics versus having a steady command of the issues and governance has been endlessly debated and hashed over. Yet, people aren’t automatons, they are feeling, caring, and emotional beings, and if there‘s the perception that someone is aloof, cold and distant, that does color their view of that person, and almost never favorably. The big knock against Clinton is she’s too cool and distant, and this is the very thing that can make the difference in bumping up the number of even those who agree with and support her to make the extra effort to get to the polls.
    Clinton will also have to walk a tightrope on President Obama’s legacy. That legacy is worth its weight in political gold to millions who made up the winning Obama coalition, and Clinton will have to reaffirm her commitment to it again and again as she has repeatedly done; that she will carry on and extend his administration’s accomplishments in everything from health care to job creation. At the same time, she’ll have to put some distance between that legacy and her to affirm that her administration won’t be just an Obama term three. That there are areas of healthy policy disagreement over issues such as TPP, and that her administration will be her administration’s and not Obama’s.
    This segues to the third challenge. That’s sealing the deal with Bernie’s supporters. Ninety percent of them say they’ll vote for her. But the real question is how many of them will actually turnout on Election Day. She’ll have to make sure most of them do by reaffirming that she’s truly a progressive and will be tough on financial regulation, wealth and income inequality, and TPP, expand tuition free college education and health care coverage.
    The election will be won or lost by the candidate who can turn the election into more than a Civics 101 exercise in casting a ballot. She’ll have to do or come close to doing what Obama did in 2008 and that’s turn her campaign and the election into a crusade. This means giving people the sense that they are truly making history by voting for her, turning back the dark forces that Trump supposedly represents, and making people believe that she can affect real hope and change. This doesn’t mean simply hoping that enough people are so scared stiff of the possibility of a Trump White House that this will be motivator enough for them to dash to the polls. This won’t make her campaign a crusade. The key is to give people something and somebody not to vote against but to vote for.
    Now here’s Hillary’s greatest challenge. That’s making people trust her. Polls show that a lot of people just don’t like her and that’s based a lot on the endlessly heard refrain to put it more charitably, that she shades the truth, and less charitably is a liar. The GOP and Trump have pounded this into the ground. The aim from the start was to embarrass and discredit her not because of her alleged missteps as Secretary of State, but as a 2016 presidential candidate. Republicans got what they wanted when their phony accusations against her of cover-up and incompetence in the Benghazi debacle got tons of media chatter and focus and raised the first shadow of public doubt. Congressional Republicans double downed on this by flailing her for supposedly hiding, deleting or misusing her private emails for some sinister and nefarious reason during her stint as Secretary of State.  There was no deliberate wrongdoing, but it left a bad odor, and this just convinced even more that trust and Clinton were an oxymoron.
    A firm strong, look the American people in the eye, by her, and vow that transparency and openness will be the two watchwords of a Clinton administration, and then make it clear that she expects to be held to that pledge is crucial. This won’t make the Hillary loathers into sudden friends, but it will tackle this issue head on and help soothe the doubts of those including many of her backers who are bothered by this.
    These challenges are formidable. But in meeting them she will go a long way toward removing much doubt that she’s the candidate who is the presidential candidate who is the complete package when it comes to a president.

    Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of How “President” Trump will Govern, (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.
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  8. Earl Ofari Hutchinson

    Calling the 2016 GOP convention the whitest of the whitest GOP conventions is not redundancy or a play on words. It underscores the fact that this convention in comparison to the 2012 GOP convention and indeed a string of other GOP conventions going back in recent time have been virtually lily white affairs. Start with the 2012 convention. Much was made before the start of that convention that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Democratic Congressman Arthur Davis, and Saratoga Springs, Utah Mayor Mia Love would be among the bevy of speakers at the convention. Much was also made that New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez, and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley would also be prominent on the speaker’s dais. This supposedly was the GOP’s public rebuke to the loud charge that it was yet another good ole’ white guys confab. The charge was more than a charge it was a brutal fact. Blacks and Hispanics were the proverbial invisible persons at the convention. African-Americans made up a paltry 2 percent of the delegates, and Hispanics only a slightly higher number.
    It wasn’t much better four years earlier in 2008. Only 36 of the more than 2,300 delegates to that convention were black. The GOP by its lowest of low minority delegate bar looked positively like a minority’s champion in 2004 when the number of black delegates soared to a towering 167 number at that convention.

    The 2016 convention may well plumb even deeper the depths in the number of minorities there. The tip-off is who is on the list of the dozens of speakers announced.  More than 80 percent of those who will take the podium are white, mostly white males.

    The chronic invisibility of minority, especially African-American speakers and delegates, at this year’s GOP convention is chalked up to Trump. That is his racially incendiary, immigrant, Hispanic and especially Muslim bashing campaign and rhetoric that got him to the top of the GOP presidential heap. This was on glaring and embarrassing display when one poll found that Trump got all of 1 percent of black voter support. Embarrassing because even Reagan and George W. Bush got about six percent of the black vote, and other GOP presidential candidate like Reagan and Bush no matter how conservative their credentials get around that percentage of the black vote.
    The paltry number of blacks and Hispanics that turn up at the GOP conventions is much more than just a reflection of a GOP presidential candidate, that is Trump, who has run a virtual one man hit campaign against minorities. And who has not so subtly aimed his hard pitch at frustrated, fearful, and angry whites, and worse unreconstructed bigots. It’s a continued hard indictment of the party that shoved him to the top. That’s on naked display in the Trump influenced 2016 GOP platform that calls for a tough crackdown on illegal immigrants, and comes dangerously close to endorsing Trump’s call for a border wall.
    Trump, however, merely swims in the party’s long standing rancid racially charged history and philosophy. The GOP is a party that promotes unabashed racially sneaky code words, a Southern Strategy, and state’s rights. It would not be the political force it is in state and especially national politics, and would not maintain its firm support base in the Deep South and the Heartland states among white rural, suburban, conservative blue collar, and male voters, if it wavered in defending its core racial turf. Even the few high profile black Republicans such as Clarence Thomas adhere to and fervently espouse the party’s hard line conservative attack points.
    There is absolutely no room for them to deviate from them. Former GOP Republican National Chairman Michael Steele had a momentary inkling that simply having black faces spout the stock conservative line would never attract more than a bare handful of blacks to the GOP. On occasion he quipped that the GOP had to give blacks some reason to embrace the GOP. But Steele even as he said that Steele was already well on his way to becoming a casualty of the GOP’s steady march backward to its extreme right-wing stance on the issues. He was soon ousted.
    With the spectacular surge of Trump there was little doubt that the GOP’s 2016 convention would play hard to white conservatives, and that the delegates to the convention would reflect their views. Trump’s virtually lily white key staffers, his selection of ultra-conservative Mike Pence as his VP running mate, and his raucous rallies before mostly white audiences were further glaring signs that the GOP convention would be a convention where minorities would be largely missing from sight.
    The 2016 GOP platform reflects much of the Tea Party agenda. The staples again are repeal the Affordable Care Act, deep slashes in government spending, the downsize of federal employment, and the gut of federal regulations on environment protection, and the lax checks on financial, and corporate abuse. The convention platform is designed to rouse the GOP’s conservative legions and will wreak even more misery on minorities. The 2016 GOP convention again delivers on what the GOP has worked overtime for years to be and that’s the whitest of whitest conventions.

    Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of Let’s Stop Denying Made in America Terrorism, (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.
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  10. Earl Ofari Hutchinson

    GOP Presidential contender Donald Trump was so happy he couldn’t jump high enough when Bill Clinton met briefly with Attorney General Loretta Lynch. This supposedly was irrefutable proof that Lynch, and by extension President Obama, and Hillary Clinton, were in cahoots to cook the books on the FBI and Justice Department probe into Hillary’s alleged misuse of State Department related emails. Trump got what he wanted; namely much GOP lambasting of Bill for alleged deal-making to scuttle the probe, the quick recusal of Lynch from any direct hand in the probe, much chatter that Clinton was shady and a liar, and much media attention to the meeting that Hillary had with the FBI.
    The three-hour meeting at FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. was the icing on the attack Hillary cake. It supposedly was even more proof that Clinton was in real hot water, and maybe, just maybe, there could actually be charges brought against her.
    There, of course, won’t be. For the simple fact that’s been a fact from the moment the whiff of scandal arose about Clinton’s use of a private server to read and send State Department related emails, there was no wrong doing involved. There was never a shred of evidence that Clinton jeopardized national security by the use of her private server. The protocols about the use of a private email server to conduct official government business were tightened after Clinton’s state Department tenure.
    However, there is indeed some momentary political fall-out from Bill’s meeting with Lynch.
    The fact that Clinton did meet with Lynch at all, no matter what the circumstances and no matter that there wasn’t a word spoken about the probe, gave Trump and the GOP more ammunition to plant the seed even deeper in the general public that the Clintons are the personification of sleaze, and that President Obama is anything but a neutral arbiter in the Justice Department probe. That in turn reinforced the very widespread notion that Clinton is prone to shade the truth about embarrassing or compromising issues. This all comes on top of incessant polls that practically join Hillary at the hip with Trump as the two presidential candidates who have the highest negatives in living presidential memory. The presidential campaign is fast getting the moniker of the race to the bottom and the impression that if Clinton wins it won’t be about her sterling political competence, qualities, leadership, experience and acumen, just that fewer people held their noses about her than Trump.
    The Bill-Lynch meeting was also a case of horrible timing. It came days after the report on the Benghazi debacle that found that Clinton had no culpability in and for the attack. This seemed to presage the expectation that the same finding would be made with the email flap. The probe would find nothing on Clinton. Bill’s meeting with Lynch hitting the news cycle hard drowned that notion out at least for the moment.
    Then there’s the recent polls. Trump’s stock has been going South in most polls. And virtually every time he lets fly a fresh zinger about firing TSA employees with hijabs, slandering a Mexican judge, or tweeting with an anti-Semitic construed emblem about Hillary, this knocks another point or two off his popularity. This makes the anti-Trump panic among many GOP party regulars and potential donors and handlers soar higher. So, for the moment, Bill’s meeting and the FBI interview seemed to offer welcome pause in the downhill run for Trump.
    The single slender thread that Trump clings to about the email probe is that Clinton is indicted in the days before the election. This won’t happen. But this won’t stop Trump from dropping strong hints every chance he gets that it should happen and if it doesn’t he’ll circle back and plop the blame for this on the alleged collusion to kill charges by variously, Bill, Hillary, Obama and Lynch.
    The great pity is that the continued GOP, media and public obsession with Clinton’s emails at times blur, ignore and flat out dodge any real talk about tax reform job growth and the economy, health care, wealth and income inequality, civil rights, environmental concerns and criminal justice reforms. These are the issues that any election should be about, and what the media and the public should care about.
    Bernie Sanders famously said at one of the early debates with Clinton that he was sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails and said the only thing that should be on the table for debate and discussion were the real issues. He got loud cheers from the mostly Democratic audience for telling the truth. There was never much chance though that the email scandal would fade to the non-issue that it is and should be. But Bill notwithstanding, whenever it’s dredged up it’s still much ado about nothing.

    Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of Let’s Stop Denying Made in America Terrorism, (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.
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  11. Earl Ofari Hutchinson

    Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is Hillary’s best bet for VP. Why? Despite the relentless lampooning, ridiculing, and name-calling of Trump, and the smug writing of his political obituary, the election will be a close run up.  The big GOP donors and handlers, the hate driven passion to beat Hillary, Trump’s skilled fear mongering and pander to bigotry, the never-ending media fawn over him, and GOP dominance in the majority of the state’s legislatures and state houses will insure that.
    The fatal mistake is to assume that simply painting and then writing off Trump as a kook will be enough to scare millions to storm the polls to defeat him. Clinton’s campaign is a political textbook study in business like organization, precision, and professionalism. But it’s not a campaign of passion.
    Its passion that pushes people, especially young people, and minorities, out the door and to the polls on Election Day. These voters made the White House a wrap for Obama in 2008 and 2012. But Clinton is not Obama, and in the handful of swing states that will decide the election, the numbers and turnout will mean everything.
    Warren provides the passion needed to get younger voters out the door Election Day. This was evident the moment that she fired up the imagination of millions by hammering on the corruption, gaming, and greed of Wall Street, and lashing the tepid, faint hearted effort by Washington to rein it in. Wall Street quickly warned that Warren was toxic for the Democrats, and reminded that a lot of its campaign money has gone to Obama and other Democrats, and that includes Hillary. The Wall Street saber-rattle about Warren cinched it. Progressives had long last found their champion and hero, and screamed for her to toss her hat in the presidential rink. Warren said no, and Sanders stepped into the breech. Though millions eagerly and fervently rallied to his bandwagon, Warren’s name was still on the lips of many. With the Democrat’s tight party rules on voting in primaries, and core Democrat and super-delegate allegiance firmly in place for Clinton, Sanders never really had much chance to outduel her for the party’s presidential nomination.
    However, the brutal reality is legions of Sanders’ backers tar Clinton as a war monger, Wall Street and corporate shill, party hack, and untrustworthy. A significant number of them vow that they will not vote for her, write in Sanders’ name, vote Green Party, or stay home. That’s OK if they are all in California, New York, or Massachusetts, lock down Democratic states, but if more than a few of them are in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Florida that could spell real trouble for Clinton. The potential ice breaker with them is someone on the Clinton ticket who is totally acceptable to Sanders and just as acceptable to Sander’s Clinton wary supporters. That obvious someone is Warren.
    Clinton is mindful of the loathing that legions of Sanders’ Democrats have for her Wall Street connection. So early on at a Democratic gubernatorial campaign rally in Massachusetts last year she was effusive in her praise of Warren and in the process took a big shot at Wall Street and the corporations minimizing their role in job creation. Later she walked it back claiming she had “short-handed” her comments. In the general election she will be continually challenged to tell which Clinton Sanders backers are to believe; the Wall Street or the populist Clinton. Warren will compel Clinton to spell out her position on the issues and tell how a Clinton administration will differ from Obama’s and husband Bill’s. She will also have to spend time making assurances that she is not the unreconstructed hawk on foreign policy issues that progressive Democratic critics lambaste her as. She’ll have to talk even more boldly about tough financial regulations and reforms, and putting real meaning into her oft stated embrace of the label “progressive.”
    A slew of unnamed Wall Street insiders recently loudly warned Clinton that if she picked Warren as your VP, she could kiss our cash good-bye. But this is just so much hot air. Policy as always will be made by the president, not the vice-president, and if they didn’t give their campaign cash to Clinton, who would they give it to, Trump, with his digs at Wall Street, doubtful. But even more, Wall Street also likes a winner, and it will not dare risk being cut out of the Washington loop by folding up its financial tent on Clinton, solely because of VP Warren.
    http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/elizabeth-warren-wall-street-vice-president-224489

    Core Democrats and the party establishment are solidly behind Clinton. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this masks the weak enthusiasm or outright opposition that many Democrats and independents who backed Sanders have to a Clinton presidential bid. Warren will do much to dispel that. Again, that makes Warren Clinton’s best bet for VP.

    Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of Let’s Stop Denying Made in America Terrorism, (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.
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  12. Earl Ofari Hutchinson

    There will be no criminal charges against Hillary Clinton in the flap over the use of her private server for State Department business. There will be no finding that Clinton broke any federal laws in using her private server. There is no evidence whatsoever that Clinton jeopardized national security by the use of her private server. The never ending House controlled GOP investigating committees have not found and will not find any new improprieties in the email flap. But that won’t stop yet another committee from trying mightily to manufacture them. The point will be made again and again that former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used his private email server during his stint at State. The point will also be made that the protocols about the use of a private email server to conduct official government business were tightened after Clinton’s state Department tenure.

    Any other time this would render the issue of Clinton’s emails a non-issue. However, this isn’t any other time. What Clinton did or didn’t do with her emails and what she knew or didn’t know about their use, was never the issue. The issue is Clinton in the White House. The GOP attack line is that Clinton is shady, untrustworthy, and less charitably, a serial liar. This has been ramped up just enough by the finger point by the State Department inspector general at Clinton for being sloppy, and careless, in the use of her emails, and not telling the truth about it, and fed by a media that salivates at the mere hint of any Clinton scandal.
    None of this is really new stuff, and there’s no foreseeable possibility that this could derail Clinton’s campaign. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t danger signs in the email controversy. The first is the danger that it could reinforce the very widespread notion that Clinton is prone to shade the truth about embarrassing or compromising issues. When the email flap broke in March, 2015, polls did show two things. One is that a lot of people were paying attention to it and two that they didn’t like it, and in far too many cases, her. It was at this point that the Clinton negatives began to march upward. The negatives were not just among Republicans. That was predictable. However, many Democrats and independents also began to mumble doubts about her too.

    This was the point that the label of “dishonest” and “untrustworthy” became a regular feature of the GOP’s talking points about Clinton. It also was embedded in much of the chatter from the media and public about Clinton. At every turn, Clinton had to hear shouts from some in the media about her emails and what this said about her integrity. It got so bad that Bernie Sanders tossed out a great throw-away line in a debate about being sick of talking about “those damn emails.” The issue, though, didn’t and wasn’t going to go away. The fresh report from the inspector general that raised a cloud over Clinton’s truthfulness about the emails made sure that it stayed front and center.
    The second danger is that the issue could continue to rear its head as a distraction during the general election showdown with Trump. The few times that Trump doesn’t try to hammer her with it, others will, and Clinton will have to take precious time out to again answer questions about what did she do and why did she do it with her emails.
    This poses the greatest danger of all. That is that the campaign will be the kind of campaign that Trump revels in. This is a campaign of muckraking, dirt and mud-slinging, personal insult, insinuations, and character assassination. Trump has tried to do that with his attacks on Bill Clinton as a serial sexual abuser, and worse, rapist. The aim was to get Hillary into a public and media shouting match with him over the tawdry allegation. Hillary hasn’t take the bait. But there will be more to come.
    The aim as always is twofold. One is plant the seed even deeper in the general public that the Clintons are the personification of sleaze. The other is to blur, ignore, and flat out dodge any real talk about tax reform job growth and the economy, health care, wealth and income inequality, civil rights, environmental concerns, and criminal justice reforms. These are the issues that any election should be about, and what the media and the public should care about. But when you have a candidate who can throw a big ballpark curve on sex and emails then the temptation to obsessively chatter on about this could prove too irresistible to pass on.
    Clinton will do everything she can to try to take the high road and let the inspector general’s reports speak for themselves; that is there was no law breaking involved, and move on. The danger is that others will do everything possible to make sure she can’t.

    Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is How “President” Trump will Govern (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.
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  14. Earl Ofari Hutchinson

    Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump made it almost official. He now has in his hip pocket the names of 11 hardline conservative judges and legal luminaries who he deems fit SCOTUS judges. The names supplied by the equally hardline conservative Heritage Foundation weren’t much a surprise. At a town hall in last December, the month before the South Carolina primary, Trump didn’t hesitate when asked who his favorite High Court justice was. He named Clarence Thomas. Thomas was his guy on the court because he is “very strong and consistent.” Trump’s 11 names, then, are in keeping with his Thomas swoon.
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-supreme-court_us_566c7597e4b0fccee16ed3bd
    Naming a High Court judge is the one issue that has ignited the greatest debate, furor and public warfare. The legal bloodbath would be even messier if “President” Trump plucked any one of the 11 names from the list as his SCOTUS choice. So the repeated question then is why would anyone play with fire with Trump and bulk at backing Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee? The possibility of one, not to mention, the possibility of two or even three more Thomas clones on the High Court given the ages of the three court liberals should be more than enough incentive to insure that Trump never gets a chance to pull that list of names out of his pocket.
    Yet polls repeatedly show that a troubling percentage of left-leaning Democrats and progressive leaning independents say they won’t back Clinton no matter what.
    One of the two stock retorts to shunning Clinton is to spit out the by now familiar epithets at her, Wall Street shill, corporate sell-out, war hawk, and untrustworthy. The Hillary bashers convince themselves that there wouldn’t be a dime’s worth of difference between a Trump White House and a Clinton White House.  The other comeback is that “President” Trump would propel legions of protesters into the streets at every Trump turn. He would be relentlessly challenged every step of the way by Congressional Democrats, civil rights, liberties, environmental, and women groups. They would stop him dead in his tracks when he tries to shove his agenda through, and that first and foremost would mean an epic war against his effort to put another Thomas on the High Court. 
    The first rationale is, of course, patently absurd. Trump has made it perfectly clear that he would try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, totally scrap the Dodd-Frank financial industry regulations, do nothing to stop the further evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, cheer lead the NRA and avoid comprehensive gun control like the plague, wreak new miseries on undocumented workers and their children, and give a wink and nod license to ramp up anti-Muslim hysteria in the country. Clinton is the diametric opposite of this and trying to make the case against her as a Trump policy look alike is beyond laughable.

    The other problem with the assumption that Trump can be easily stopped is there is no guarantee that Senate Democrats and progressive House Democrats would not still be in the minority in Congress. If that is the case, they would be at the mercy of a White House now in the hands of a fickle reactionary, and a Congress that would giddily aid and abet his most rightwing draconian initiatives and legislation. That wouldn’t be all. Protest groups would have leverage only in the forces they could muster in the streets. But Trump and a Republican Majority Congress would be virtually immune to those protests since they did not rely on them to win or stay in office.
    This makes the case for Clinton even more urgent even without Trump in the White House but with Congress in the GOP’s grip. She is the only one who could then stand deflect, derail, or at the least minimize the irreparable political carnage that the GOP would wreak if it kept the Senate and the House.
    Now back to Trump and the Supreme Court. In decades past, many Democratic and Republican appointed justices scrapped party loyalties and based their legal decisions solely on the merit of the law, constitutional principles and the public good. Trump’s favorite judge, Thomas, has gone full steam in the other direction. He has blatantly rammed his strictest of strict constructionist ideology into every opinion he’s written and vote he’s cast on civil rights, police powers, corporate financial dealings, the death penalty, abortion, and voting rights. He has firmly carved out a granite like niche as one of the most reflexive, knee jerk, reactionary jurists to grace the court in decades.

    Thomas punctuates that by being the court’s first openly public recluse and with rare exceptions refusing to utter a peep during any of the oral arguments before the court. But then there’s not much need since his votes are already guaranteed.

    Saying no to Clinton is the most dangerous od dangerous propositions. It would say yes to the possibility of three more Thomas’s on the High Court.


    Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is How “President” Trump will Govern (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.
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