Corruption
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Well, I’m loathe to write about this, but I’ll try to make it quick and painless.
The FT has a better than most piece titled, How the 90s Shaped Donald Trump’s Politics of National Despair. It correctly ties the beginning of the politics that elected Trump in 2016 and 2024 back to the 1992 election, really you have to go back further, nonetheless '92 was very important.
I was there in the Democratic primaries with former California Gov Jerry Brown. We ran a soon, very unfortunately forgotten campaign about how American politics was broken and eminently corrupt. If it wasn’t fixed nothing would get better. Kicking off this campaign, we indicted the Democratic party establishment at the DNC’s 1991 Los Angeles meeting. It’s a speech that holds up well today. It correctly stated if nothing was done, the Boomers would be the first generation in American history to leave their children and grandchildren a nation worse off than the one they inherited. CSPAN has the speech up, if you want a bit of relative history for today and a still relevant message, I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
I remember the night before the speech, sitting with Jerry and Pat Caddell, going over the final draft. Jerry was more than a little nervous. For him, the speech was a crossing of the Rubicon. The next day he did. With one hand behind our backs, we got further than all thought. We should have at the very least stopped the Clintons.
With the Clintons winning, corruption rose exponentially, everything was for sale. Our message, this is especially a problem when the only politics are campaign politics, was lost to history. That is, lost until 2016 when Donald Trump took a good bit of it and kept Mrs. Clinton from her self-anointed destiny to rule .
Amusingly, Donald Trump as a once political outsider for the most part means less about what he says than most career politicians. The NYT has a piece of someone being shocked, shocked to find there's corruption going on in the Trump White House. Like all Democratic pearl clutching politics today, everything starts and ends with Trump, leaving aside the previous culpability of the Clintons, Obama, and lord help us Old Joe Biden, thus dooming any ability to change it.
Which gets back to ‘92 and our call to the American people, if things have any hope of being fixed it's up to them – We the People.
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