Is there ever a time she’s not a miserable troll?
Via Newsbusters:
Some pundits have speculated that the Baltimore riots may benefit Republicans in next year’s elections. On the other hand, Joan Walsh of Salon and MSNBC thinks that the unrest has yielded an opportunity for liberalism.
In a two-part series, Walsh argued that one lesson of Baltimore is that Democrats’ Bill Clintonesque center-left “approach to race, crime and inequality” has proved inadequate, and that the party now must confront “the big structural issues driving poverty and rising inequality, not the behavior of the poor.” Meanwhile, sniped Walsh, when it comes to those problems the GOP is “still race baiting” and “still stuck in the 1980s.”
“While [the Democratic] party grapples openly with the limits to the legacy of [its] most influential politician,” Walsh wrote, Republicans can’t or won’t “acknowledge that the man who shaped their domestic agenda, Ronald Reagan, is long dead, and a lot of his ideas should have died with him. 2016 will offer the nation a starker choice on these issues than any election in recent memory, and that can only be good for the country.”
From Walsh’s Tuesday piece (bolding added):
Clinton…cared about civil rights and poverty. He saw the way Republicans had used both issues against Democrats since the 1960s and he tried to fight it, even if he had to wade into the swamp of white backlash politics…
His notorious “Sister Souljah” moment during the 1992 campaign; his crime and welfare reform policies; his railing against “big government;” all were tailored to reassure white people that Democrats had heard their concerns about the excesses of the war on poverty, and would incorporate the politics of personal responsibility into future efforts to promote equality…
…[O]n Obama’s watch, we’ve come up hard on the limits of the ’90s approach to race, crime and inequality…
…[O]ur first black president continues to preach the importance of personal responsibility in improving black lives, even as police murder black men on camera. His opponents don’t care: they continue to stereotype Obama as a lazy, criminal-coddling, poverty pimp of old…