04/04/2016. I wrote this last night, before today’s news from Indiana. I don’t say the presidency is a kick-in for Hillary. She has many skeletons and Trump, who has even ‘higher negatives’ but fewer known skeletons, will go at her with max aggression. (Contrast this with Bernie saying he’ll ask his support base to shift to backing Clinton if – when – the time comes, thereby revealing the limits of ‘democratic socialism’.) Nevertheless, the odds are now strongly in her favour.
The next President of the United States is likely to be Hillary Clinton, subject of a recent post on this site. Today Gary Leupp, Professor of History at Tufts University, is given 10,000 words in CounterPunch to assess her record in office: what she’s done, how she thinks and how she is likely to behave in the White House.
Overly deterministic marxists dismiss governments of parliamentary/presidential democracies as mere figureheads for the ruling class. There’s some truth in that: whoever occupies the Oval Office does so on the sufferance of big capital. But a president with sufficient support in that quarter – and the Clintons have spent a lifetime securing precisely that – wields considerable authority and is backed by a hand picked team of likeminded politicians and technocrats. The designation, “most powerful man person in the world” may be wide of the mark but the left should not assume it matters not whose hands are at the controls of what I’ve taken to calling the most dangerous nation on earth.
Double negatives aside, Gary Leupp’s is a clear, orderly and closely argued appraisal of the likeliest next White House occupant:
Actually, not that it matters, I’m not an associate professor but a full professor.
My apologies Gary and thanks for taking the trouble to clarifiy. I don’t know where I picked up the “associate” but won’t have invented it so I’m guessing there’s an error elsewhere; in CounterPunch perhaps, or Wiki. Anyway, I’ve made the change and it’s a fine piece you wrote.