Liberalism’s Big Bet
As a gesture, it was immensely powerful. Anyone who came of age with Ronald Reagan found more to recognize in the Democratic Party’s rhetoric last week than in Donald Trump’s self-aggrandizing George Wallace imitation.
.. Yes, the convention’s showmanship was strikingly unifying, bipartisan, moderate — but Hillary Clinton’s domestic agenda is not. She’s running as a liberal, full stop, with a platform well to the left of where her party stood five or 10 or 20 years ago.
.. But on social issues, Clinton and her party aren’t even offering the fig leaf of her husband’s “safe, legal and rare” formulation.
.. But the absence of outreach is still notable, especially in a campaign that the Democrats are casting as a kind of national emergency.