It’s Gotta Be Hillary

I’ve made it pretty clear I have no love for the Clintons.

But she’s got to be / is going to be the Veep.

1. Barack needs to make sure that there is a gender gap that works in his favor. With Hillary’s help, he can do much better with white women which will give him enough of the white vote to win the election.

2. Hillary is the only Veep choice that brings him a candidate who can move the base and turn people out in droves to events and fundraisers. And Bill is pretty good at that as well.

3. Hillary clearly wants it, and actually does have something of a claim to it, given the race she has run. If she doesn’t get it, she could create problems.

The disadvantage is figuring out what to do with Hillary and, even more with Bill, after January. Barack will come up with something. (I don’t think putting her or him in charge of health care reform is in the offing, however.)

I’ve not been fond of the Clintons for a long time. It goes back to a few days after the 1992 election when I heard Bill Clinton talking about his ambitious plans for health care and I turned to a friend and said, “I sure hope he knows now to count to sixty.” It took no special prescience to see the disaster of Clinton care coming. The program was formulated in secret with plenty of experts but few congressional allies. Those experts were more intent on creating a document to satisfy their fellow wonks than in developing a plan that might attract a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. No one was surprised that the Clintons lost both the Congress and the issue. Instead of using the failure of the Congress to address the major issue of the early 1990s and elect more Democrats in the 1992 election, the clumsy dénouement of Clinton care lead to an historic loss of control of the House of Representatives.

Opponents of gay marriage often argue that accepting that practice will put us on a “slippery slope” to the acceptance of polygamous marriage. (See, for example, this piece from the Weekly Standard. Today the Inquirer published an essay by Martha Nussbaum that grasped the challenge of the “slippery slope” argument by saying that there is nothing problematic about polygamous marriage.

Evidently transparency only goes so far in the Nutter administration.

It was widely reported that the budget plan adopted by Council retained the Cohen Wage Tax Rebate but delays implementation of the program for another year until 2014.

Now it is itself is a bit of a farce to delay the beginning of the program until after the next election for Mayor or Council. Michael Nutter wouldn’t claim to be serving the interests of the business community by promising a big BPT cut in 2014 but doing nothing now.

But now it seems that this farce is the least of our problems.

Stan Shapiro recently sent an email that said

It turns out that the Cohen rebate has actually been stunted, not just postponed. Under the law as it is now, the rate for low wage workers would go down to 1.5% no matter what, in yearly half percent increments starting in 2012.

Some notes on the Presidential Race

Larry Farnese's victory is a major win for progressives.

That’s true for three reasons.

1. Larry is a real progressive, totally committed to open and transparent government and determined to use government to make lives better for everyone, including those who are outside the mainstream of economic life.

2.Farnese’s victory moves forward the transition to a new kind of politics. Larry has been attacked for his alliance with Senator Fumo’s team. But what the people making those attacks fail to understand is that Larry made that alliance without giving up his ideals. He is someone who understands that Philadelphia politics is not just going to be about factions jockeying for patronage, contracts, and power in the future. Ideas and innovative public policy are going to play a larger role. Farnese may now be a Fumocrat, but he is a new breed of Fumocrat.