Flip Flop

A person can change position as he is presented with new information or as situations change. I have no problem with that. I would, in fact, have a problem with a person who refused to change position in the face of an evolving environment. But the Democratic Party has changed its fundamental campaign principle from “hope and change”  to “maintain the status quo,” and has done it entirely for the purpose of maintaining its grip on the power of the White House.

I would expect Hillary Clinton to use pretty much anything she can to be critical of Bernie Sanders. I do not say that critically of Clinton; she is running against him in an election. She cannot oppose his plan for universal health care on its merits, Democrats have been advocating that for decades, but she has to find some manner in which to be critical of his espousal of it, and so she decides that his promise is too radical and can never succeed. She claims that we need to maintain the present plan and just tinker with some improvements to it.

So far, I have no problem with the ethics of this, although I would certainly be inclined to back the candidate who has more courage and not the cowardly candidate who says that my nation is incapable of adopting significant change. Canada was able to convert from the same system we presently use for health care to the universal plan that Sanders proposes, and I’m no fan of anyone who claims Canada can do that which America cannot.

My issue is with the Democratic Party, who backs the Clinton approach. “This is a nation of incremental change,” is the mantra of the party leadership, after eight years of marching in lockstep with a president who was the “hope and change” presidential candidate. Either the nation changed pretty dramatically in the past eight years, which would debunk their “nation of incremental change” theory, or the Democratic Party did.

They are, however, trying to change and not change at the same time, to be both revolutionary and status quo, because they are campaigning for the first female president and suggesting that we should vote for her both because she is a woman and because she won’t change things very much.

So other than changing history by her gender she’s not going to do much, and voting for her purely to feminize the White House would not be the least bit sexist. Voting for someone else, and thereby avoiding feminizing the White House, would make you a chauvinist misogynistic pig.