Subject: Fwd: CLIP | Washington Post: E.J. Dionne: The political power of ‘you’
From: Dan Schwerin <[email-masked]>
To: Joel Benenson <[email-masked]>, Jim Margolis <[email-masked]>, Mandy Grunwald <[email-masked]>, "Jennifer Palmieri ([email-masked])" <[email-masked]>, "John Podesta ([email-masked])" <[email-masked]>, Robby Mook - HRC <[email-masked]>, "Kristina Schake ([email-masked])" <[email-masked]>, Huma Abedin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2015 16:41:16 -0400

Timely headline for our discussion

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ian Sams <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 4:24 PM
Subject: CLIP | Washington Post: E.J. Dionne: The political power of ‘you’
To: Clips <[email-masked]>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-taps-the-political-power-of-you/2015/06/07/0329b954-0bdd-11e5-9e39-0db921c47b93_story.html

The political power of ‘you’

By E.J. Dionne Jr. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/ej-dionne-jr> Opinion
writer June 7 at 7:57 PM

Whenever some new allegation threatened Bill Clinton’s presidential
candidacy in 1992, he had a go-to response throughout the campaign.

“This election isn’t about me,” he’d tell voters
<http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/03/us/the-1992-campaign-democrats-clinton-speech-focuses-on-policy-not-victory.html>.
“It’s about all of *you*.” He said “you” with such force that it would come
out as a two- or three-syllable word.

Hillary Clinton, who has picked up her husband’s locution on occasion, is
going to have to run a “you” campaign, too. And last week, she insisted
that the ranks of the “you’s” out there should include as much of the
potential electorate as possible.

From the beginning of 2015, Republicans have enjoyed enormous success in
making her campaign all about her — focusing on any aspect of her life (or
her husband’s) that might turn off voters otherwise open to her policies.
It’s no surprise that her personal ratings have fallen.

Her champions have complained that we know far more about her speech fees
and e-mail habits than what she would do in office. Blaming the media is by
no means a useless campaign tactic. Republicans do it all the time,
claiming that the media are “liberal.” It’s a fatuous charge given how
thoroughly reporters have covered every question raised about Clinton. But
trashing reporters won’t solve Clinton’s political problems and might even
make some of them worse.

There is only one tried-and-true way for a candidate to displace a story
line she doesn’t like, and that is to come up with a story line of her own.
If Clinton wants the campaign to be about how she’d govern, she will have
to inundate the media with substance.

She made a good start last week by speaking forcefully about voting rights
<https://www.hillaryclinton.com/feed/hillary-clinton-we-should-make-it-easier-vote/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=tw&utm_campaign=20150604remarks_votingrights>and
reminding the country of how far right the Republican Party has moved over
50 years. Republicans were once at the forefront in tearing down barriers
to voting. It fell to segregationist Democrats in the South to defend
discriminatory voting laws. Now, it’s Republicans who are trying to shrink
the electorate.

On their face, Clinton’s proposals ought to win wide assent. She endorsed
“universal, automatic voter registration” under which “every young man or
young woman should be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18 —
unless they actively choose to opt out.” In an era when we have made it so
convenient for people to buy and sell things and stay in touch with each
other, why do we maintain cumbersome bureaucratic obstacles to exercising a
basic democratic right?

Drawing on last year’s bipartisan report from the Presidential Commission
on Election Administration
<https://www.supportthevoter.gov/files/2014/01/Amer-Voting-Exper-final-draft-01-09-14-508.pdf>,
Clinton called for establishing the principle that no one should have to
wait more than 30 minutes to vote. She also proposed a national standard of
“at least 20 days of early in-person voting everywhere — including
opportunities for weekend and evening voting.”

Clinton denounced the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision that “eviscerated” the
Voting Rights Act
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-stops-use-of-key-part-of-voting-rights-act/2013/06/25/26888528-dda5-11e2-b197-f248b21f94c4_story.html>
 and called out some of her Republican rivals (Rick Perry, Scott Walker,
Chris Christie and Jeb Bush) for supporting new barriers to voting.
Republicans, she said, should stop “fear-mongering about a phantom epidemic
of election fraud and start explaining why they’re so scared of letting
citizens have their say.”

There’s a bad habit in reporting on voting rights these days. Because those
kept from voting by the various new restrictions tend to lean Democratic
(especially African Americans, Latinos and young people), the issue is
typically discussed in partisan terms. And, in fact, as Clinton pointed
out, some of the new laws are laughably partisan. Texas, for example
<http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/10/18/supreme_court_allows_strict_texas_voter_id_law.html>,
allows a concealed-weapon permit to be used as identification at the polls
but not a student ID.

But the core issue here is much larger than current party alignments. It
involves the same principle that motivated the sponsors of the Voting
Rights Act in 1965: Are we a genuinely democratic republic in which the
federal government guarantees broad participation, or will state
politicians be allowed to shape the electorate to keep a particular class —
i.e., themselves — in power?

The question for the future of American politics is whether Republicans
will be forced to moderate and modify their current tilt to the right in
response to demographic changes in the electorate, or whether they will
manage to keep enough of the new America away from the polls that they
don’t have to listen to it at all.

Clinton can win an election about big questions. She will spend the summer
talking about them. And in the process, she, too, will preach the virtues
of the elongated “you.”

-- 

*Ian Sams* | Rapid Response

Hillary for America

(423) 915-6592 | @IanSams <https://twitter.com/iansams>

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