Guest post by aphra behn
Good morning to the Hillary supporting community! Let’s get down to business.
As The Guardian put it, on Wednesday, Clinton “savaged” Trump’s national security plans in response to the attack on the Pulse:
“Not one of Donald Trump’s reckless ideas would have saved a single life in Orlando,” Clinton said. “A ban on Muslims would not have stopped this attack. Neither would a wall. I don’t know how one builds a wall to keep the internet out,” she told an event in Hampton, Virginia.
… Her event on Wednesday, at the Virginia Air and Space Center, was emblematic of the ways in which Clinton has sought to distinguish herself from Trump. Seated at a roundtable with military families and service members, Clinton offered only brief remarks before engaging in a conversation with attendees that resembled the listening tour she embarked upon when launching her campaign.
Among the topics discussed were the impact of cuts to the defense budget, longstanding gaps in veterans’ care, and how to identify and target lone wolf threats such as the Orlando terrorist. The low-key event aimed to highlight Clinton’s grasp over both foreign and domestic issues – she has long described herself as a policy wonk – while countering Trump’s preference for rallies of which the hallmarks are showmanship and bravado.
“After all the Twitter rants and conspiracy theories we’ve been hearing recently, it’s time for a substantive discussion about how we protect our country,” Clinton said.
Today, the campaign will start releasing new ads in states identified as anti-Trump battlegrounds:
By reserving time in key swing states — at least Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia — the Clinton camp is sending an unmistakable message to the presumptive GOP nominee that it intends to press into traditionally Republican territory without spending too much time worrying about defending traditionally Democratic destinations where Trump insists he will compete, said a handful of high-level Democrats close to the Clinton effort.
The ad barrage — slated to start on Thursday — will combine with a weeks-old onslaught from the major pro-Clinton super PAC, Priorities USA Action, which has already blanketed swing states with its own blistering negative spots and plans to stay on air until Election Day.
Coming just as Clinton celebrates one of the strongest stretches of her campaign — marked by the clinching of the party nomination, Bernie Sanders’ fade, and endorsements from President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren — the move is a confirmation of the campaign’s intent to take an aggressive posture toward the real estate developer.
And, roughly one month before Republicans gather for their convention, Trump’s political operation shows no signs of being ready to respond to the flood that could easily cost three times as much cash as he has on hand — just $2.4 million, as of his last federal report.
Here’s a taste of the campaign’s direction:
Belgium: Donald Trump's favorite "city."https://t.co/9ASLMhAbiF
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 16, 2016
The campaign is also seriously looking at VP candidates, and the finalists are not who you might think:
The vetting remains in its early stages. So far, potential candidates have been scrutinized using publicly available information. The Clinton team hasn’t asked anyone to submit tax returns or other personal information, one of the people said. Conversations with Mrs. Clinton herself about options are just now beginning.
Beyond the Massachusetts senator, other prospective candidates include Labor Secretary Tom Perez; Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro; Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Cory Booker of New Jersey; Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and Reps. Xavier Becerra of California and Tim Ryan of Ohio, several Democrats said.
Also! Don’t look now, but Tina Nguyen at Vanity Fair says that early polls suggest Clinton may win in a landslide:
After several weeks of polls that showed Hillary Clinton only a few points ahead of Trump, and two that put her lead within the margin of error, Bloomberg on Tuesday released a poll giving the former secretary of state a whopping 12-point lead on Trump in a head-to-head matchup. A popular vote with results in that range would lead to an electoral landslide, too: according to a Frontloading HQ analysis, released Monday, Clinton destroys Trump in the electoral college, 358 to 180. Last week, an ABC poll showed her winning the national map with 262 to 191, assuming Trump takes all the Republican-leaning states.
Clinton’s favorability ratings, too, are better relative to Trump’s rapidly tanking numbers. Another ABC poll shows Trump at a 70 percent unfavorability rating, only one point away from his highest unfavorable score ever, which is still much higher than Clinton’s high of 55 percent. (In an election where both the candidates are widely unpopular, Clinton will likely take victories where she can find them.) Anothersurvey, published Wednesday by CBS, found that while Americans were divided by Clinton’s response to the recent mass shooting in Orlando (36 percent approved, 34 percent disapproved), a clear majority of respondents were appalled by Trump’s reaction, which involved bothpatting himself on the back and accusing Barack Obama of secretly harboring terrorist sympathies.
Maybe part of Clinton’s success will be winning over Republicans who have some shred of human decency left? She’s won the endorsement of former Republican senator Larry Pressler, for one:
I spent twenty-two years as a Republican member of the U.S. Congress from the state of South Dakota — four in the U.S. House and eighteen in the United States Senate. The Orlando shooting convinced me that many Republicans/Independents/citizens have a responsibility to speak out now to get some background check legislation passed. Secretary Hillary Clinton has been very courageous on this subject—she has stood up to the NRA.
...In terms of policy, Mrs. Clinton wins hands down. Secretary Clinton has had the courage to have a specific policy on background checks. That is my immediate reason for endorsing her.
I must confess that my own thinking on this has evolved over the years. I am a pheasant hunter and a Vietnam combat veteran and I’ve always felt we needed some form of background checks, but in the last twenty years since I left Congress, we have had shooting after shooting. I have four grandchildren in public schools and the thought has crossed my mind at how awful it must have been for the people who lost children in the Sandy Hook incident.
The citing of Muslims as the universal cause of terrorism is unacceptable. The New York Times has recently pointed out that Mormons (and I am a Mormon) are very upset with Mr. Trumps’ anti-Muslim statements, as our religion was persecuted for a long time in the last century
And now, speaking of Republicans for Hillary, let’s have some Thursday Herstory with Republican women!
You may recall a few months back when the GOP candidates were asked about women to be placed on US money, they fumbled around to come up with any. To their (minimal) credit, a few came up with decent candidates (Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Abigail Adams, Rosa Parks). The rest either named foreigners (Mother Theresa! Margaret F***ing Thatcher!) or their relatives. (Literally, “my wife,” “my mother,” and “my daughter” all made appearances.) Pathetic. In this and in next week’s feature, I’m going to profile a few women with strong ties to the Republican, yes Republican party. Today’s dynamic duo: Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper.
Mary Church was born in 1863 in Memphis, TN, daughter of Robert Reed Church, the South’s first black millionaire. Mary earned both a bachelor’s degree (in Classical Languages) and a master’s degree (in education) from Oberlin College in Ohio, one of the relatively few universities of the day that that welcomed black women. She then began teaching, eventually landing a position in 1887 at M Street Colored High Schoolin Washington D.C. There she met the man who would become her husband, Robert Heberton Terrell. She also met fellow Oberlin graduate Anna Julia Cooper—a woman with a remarkable story of her own.
Anna had been born in 1858 to Hannah Stanley Haywood, a woman enslaved in the home of George Washington Haywood of North Carolina. In 1868, Anna received a scholarship to attend Saint Augustine's Normal School and Collegiate Institute, where she eventually became an instructor. While there, she married George A. C. Cooper. When he passed away in 1879, she decided to further her education at Oberlin College, where she did both a B.A. and M.A. She was hired to teach at the M Street School in mathematics and science.
While teaching at the M Street School, Cooper completed and published an extremely important book, A Voice From the South. Published in 1892, it offered a broad yet incisive look at the situation of the African-American community, with a particular focus on black women. Cooper argued that segregation was anathema to American morality, art, and intellectual life; she hailed education as the best hope for African-Americans to rise politically, economically, and socially. She noted that black women’s education had been particularly neglected, and saw this as an underestimated aspect of black oppression. Cooper very much embraced the 19th century Cult of True Womanhood, which held that women, by nature, were natural arbiters of morality and purity, while men were suited to warfare and hard physical labor, coarsening their moral sense. Cooper argued that black women had just as much of this feminine moral sense as their white counterparts, needing only adequate educational opportunities to refine it. Suffrage for all women, she wrote, would lead to "the supremacy of moral forces of reason and justice and love in the government of the nation."
Cooper’s work also analyzed the construction of black Americans in American literature—an early piece of cultural analysis that reminds us how much representation of marginalized people by members of marginalized communities matters:
In the second half of her book, Cooper discusses a number of authors and their representations of African Americans. Among others, she discusses Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albion Tourgée, George Washington Cable, William Dean Howells, and Maurice Thompson. Cooper reaches the conclusion that an accurate depiction of African Americans has yet to be written, and she calls for an African American author to take up this challenge: "What I hope to see before I die is a black man honestly and appreciatively portraying both the Negro as he is, and the white man, occasionally, as seen from the Negro's standpoint."
While Cooper was writing and teaching, her friend Mary Church, now Terrell, had been obliged to resign from her teaching position in 1891 after her marriage. Both remained dedicated activists. In 1892, the friends helped to found an important political and social club for black women, the Colored Women’s League in Washington. From this and other black women’s clubs, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was formed in 1896, with Terrell elected as its first president. She lectured across the country on the topics of suffrage and civil rights, as did Cooper. (Both were international speakers as well. Cooper was one of only two women who spoke at the Pan-African Conference in London in 1890. In 1904, Church spoke in Germany, to the International Council of Women, addressing them entirely in the German language.)
While they both embraced the cause of women’s rights, Cooper and Terrell struggled with the racism of many white suffragists, and strove to educate and persuade white women to view the cause in a more universal (even intersectional) fashion. Terrell, in particular, forged close ties with many white feminists, including the elderly Susan B. Anthony, who became a close friend. When Terrell spoke at the 1898 American Woman Suffrage Association’s anniversary event, she asked her majority-white audience to reflect on how much black women had done to seize the opportunities afforded them:
To use a thought of the illustrious Frederick Douglass, if judged by the depths from which they have come, rather than by the heights to which those blessed with centuries of opportunities have attained, colored women need not hang their heads in shame. Consider if you will, the almost insurmountable obstacles which have confronted colored women in their efforts to educate and cultivate themselves since their emancipation, and I dare assert, not boastfully, but with pardonable pride, I hope, that the progress they have made and the work they have accomplished, will bear a favorable comparison at least with that of their more fortunate sisters, from the opportunity of acquiring knowledge and the means of self-culture have never been entirely withheld... Though the slaves were liberated less than forty years ago, penniless, and ignorant, with neither shelter nor food, so great was their thirst for knowledge and so herculean were their efforts to secure it, that there are today hundreds of negroes, many of them women, who are graduates, some of them having taken degrees from the best institutions of the land.
And although you won’t see her depicted in most pop culture portrayals of women’s suffrage protests, Mary Church Terrell was one of those who picketed the Wilson White House for woman suffrage. In fact, despite white suffragists’ attempts to sideline black suffragists for fear of ruffling Southern sensibilities, she marched in the landmark 1913 women’s suffrage parade (as did other members of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority such as Ida B. Wells) Her work for women’s suffrage deserves to be much, much better known.
Education remained a lifelong passion for both women. Universal kindergarten opportunities was one of Terell’s favorite causes, while Cooper fought to prepare more black students for college. In 1901, she became the first female principal of the M Street school and embarked on a campaign to reform the curriculum to better prepare students for higher education. In 1925, Cooper defended her dissertation,The Attitude of France on the Question of Slavery Between 1789 and 1848, at the Sorbonne. She was only the fourth African-American woman to receive a doctorate, and the first to write a dissertation entirely in the French language.
Both women understood the power of organization and association. Terrell’s was one of charter signatures for the NAACP. Cooper organized one of the first chapters of the Campfire Girls, as well as founding YWCA chapters specifically for young women of color. In her 70s, Terrell helped force the American Association of University Women to desegregate, and became its first African-American member. And, as I mentioned, they were both friendly towards the Republican party. Cooper wrote that black women were key to the party’s success with black men. Terrell served as president of the Women's Republican League during Harding’s presidential campaign in 1920 and was an active supporter in 1952, when she voted for Adlai Stevenson. Ever politically active, she embarked on a major push for desegregation of Washington DC’s restaurants in her final years:
While the suit dragged through the courts, Terrell and her group met with restaurant and store owners trying to convince them to open their lunch counters to everyone. Some businesses complied, but many more remained closed to African Americans. Terrell encouraged boycotts and picketed the holdouts. For two years Terrell, now aged and stooped, led the picket line day after day, in all kinds of weather. InBlack Foremothers: Three Lives, a younger picketer is quoted as recalling: "When my feet hurt I wasn't going to let a women fifty years older than I do what I couldn't do. I kept on picketing." One by one, the restaurants gave in and on June 8, 1953, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Terrell's favor.
Mary Church Terrell passed away in 1954 at the age of 90; Cooper died in 1964 aged 105. Their contributions to the cause of American freedom were remarkable. While I’m a big fan of Harriet Tubman, either—or both—of these great ladies would also look good on American currency. And, Republican or no, I’ve a sneaking suspicion that they would both be voting Hillary Rodham Clinton—not Trump-- in 2016.
And speaking of Republicans for Hillary...here’s one more: Arne Carlson, former governor of Minnesota, and holy smoke, is that some feminist-informed analysis?
Hillary was a visitor in our home while I was governor. She'd been working on programs for children, and my wife was very interested in that as well. The two of them went into the fridge and made sandwiches and literally sat up until 1 o'clock in the morning talking. I found her very kind, a very good person.
Hillary did something First Ladies since Eleanor Roosevelet haven't done, and that was engage in public policy. She really drove the healthcare debate, and that was the first concerted effort to demonize her, orchestrated by the insurance companies.
I think men have to realize their attitude toward women has not been fully appropriate. If a man like Donald Trump screams at his audience, that's okay, it's exciting, he's whipping his people up. If a woman does the exact same thing, she's shrill, unladylike.
Writing at Blue Nation Review, Melissa McEwan has one last big favor to ask of Hillary Clinton:
We have asked a lot of Hillary Clinton. We have asked her to abide relentless misogyny and personal attacks; to patiently wait her turn; to be ready but not ambitious; to be strong but vulnerable; to have gravitas but be fun; to speak with authority but not too loudly; to know everything but not be a know-it-all.
We have asked her to navigate all manner of impossible and irreconcilable expectations. We have asked her to be extraordinary, and to not be offended when we refuse to recognize that she is.
And now we are asking her to defeat Donald Trump. Just one more thing, please. Just keep this man away from the US presidency, while somehow finding a way to be the only woman who’s ever been elected.
“I’m in,” she says. “I relish the opportunity.”
Which is all the confirmation I need that we’ve picked the right woman for the job.
Go get ’em, Hillary. We’ve got your back.
As primary voting has finally ended, let me say it has been a pleasure to be part of the Hillary-supporting community at this time. Many thanks to Lysis, who wrote and sustained this series for months on end, with a faith in both Hilary Clinton and basic human decency that are pretty awe-inspiring. He cultivated a wonderful community, with the help of its many fantastic participants1 (And it’s been nice to get to know some of those promoting positive Sanders coverage at Daily Kos as well, such as LieparDestin of the BNR—by the way, have you congratulated him on his good newsyet?) Thanks, everyone, for being #WithHer because she’s #WithUs! Let’s go make some herstory!
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(originally posted at Daily Kos)