Skip to main content

There's Something About Amy

By



It's safe to say very few of us would have known anything about Amy Klobuchar if it wasn't for her exchange with Brett Kavanaugh over his drinking habits during his confirmation hearings. Klobuchar dropped that her father is a recovering alcoholic at age 90, but that didn't deter future Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh from blithely dismissing his drinking binges as something everyone did.

Since then Klobuchar has become a media favorite, parlaying her newfound fame into a presidential run, which unfortunately hasn't gained much traction.  Frustrated, she has started to lash out at her opponents, namely Pete Buttigieg, who she feels has garnered way too much attention being the mayor of a small city.  She feels a woman with that limited experience wouldn't be taken seriously by the media.  Well, that isn't exactly true as Tulsi Gabbard doesn't have a very deep resume and she is garnering a lot of media attention.

Part of the problem is that Amy comes across as a nagging mom wanting to take your privileges away.  When all the other Democratic candidates were floating the idea of cancelling student loan debts, Amy called it unrealistic.  This didn't sit well with the CNN town hall and she never really recovered from it.  It also didn't help that some of her staffers called her out for her reputation of cruelty and repeated emotional abuse.

Amy also doesn't think big, and people want a presidential candidate who thinks big.  This is why Liz Warren has risen to the top of the polls.  She not only wants to cancel student debt, she wants universal health care, a massive ecologically-friendly infrastructure program, and a host of other plans to finally bring the United States into the 21st century.  We all know Liz won't be able to achieve these lofty goals, at least not during her lifetime, but we at least want to hear candidates express themselves in broad terms, and paint a vision for the country.

The irony of singling out Mayor Pete is that he has the same Midwest sensibilities.  He too questioned Liz Warren's Utopian vision by factoring in his zero multiplier - as in zero chance of getting through Congress.  At least, he offers a catchy retort.  Amy just whines that she isn't being heard over all these grand ambitions.

Actually, cancelling student loans isn't a bad idea.  It would free up a lot of money into the economy by lifting a huge burden off the backs of middle-class Americans.  Conservatives worry it sends the wrong message, but then what kind of message did we send by bailing out the banks and auto industry? They aided and abetted the debt crisis by offering low interest loans with zero down payments and then bundled up all these toxic loans and sold them off to foreign banks in an effort to spread the debt over a broader surface.  That isn't exactly what I call great fiscal management.  At least with student loan relief, you are actually helping somebody.  It doesn't deal with the long-term problem of over-priced tuitions, but it does get the monkey off many Americans' backs.

I suspect Amy won't be around much longer.  She hasn't even managed to catch Donald Trump's attention, which is a pretty sad indicator of where she sits in the polls.  This must be awfully frustrating for a person who has built her political career slowly and methodically only to gain little more than honorable mention in this broad field of candidates.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more