Change, he seemed to say, does not have to come from someone who is new on the scene. What’s more important is whether that person has experience making change. (There is perhaps is a hint of lingering anti-Obama sentiment in the argument, as if Bill is telling voters who are not fond of how the Obama Presidency turned out that they shouldn’t pick novelty over experience again.)
How to Beat Hillary Clinton (by Barak Obama’s staff)
The conventional wisdom is that he inspired voters with an uplifting message and out-organized Clinton in Iowa and elsewhere. And while it’s true that Obama had a superior organization and an optimistic message, the real beginning of the end for Hillary Clinton was when Obama attacked her greatest vulnerability: her character.
.. Obama’s strategists argued that the “key premise” of the campaign was that 2008 would be a change election, and that while Hillary was trying to “define this as change from George Bush,” Obama had a broader definition, one that emphasized her weaknesses:
.. everything in Obama’s campaign, including his slogan—“Change you can believe in”—was meant to provide a contrast with Hillary, not on policy, but on character:
“Change you can believe in” was intended to frame the argument along the character fault line, and this is where we can and must win this fight. We cannot let Clinton especially blur the lines on who is the genuine agent of change in this election.• The reason Clinton can’t be trusted or believed when it comes to change is that she represents, to a great degree, the three sources of discontent formulated in our premise.
• She’s driven by political calculation not conviction, regularly backing away and shifting positions on issues ranging from war, to Social Security, to trade, to reform.
• She embodies trench warfare vs. Republicans, and is consumed with beating them rather than unifying the country and building consensus to get things done.
• She prides herself on working the system, not changing it—rebuffing reforms on everything from lobbyist donations to budget earmarks... Hillary learned a lot of lessons from the 2007-2008 battle with Obama. In fact, one of the first decisions she made this time around was to hire Joel Benenson, the pollster who helped write the memo on how to beat her.
Change Comes From the Margins
Indeed, there is a strong sense that not only Dada but also avant-garde in general is very much about a rebellion of the margins against the center. A remarkable number of avant-garde artists of the 19th and 20th centuries came — in person or vicariously, through their work — from the margins: Munch, Malevich, Brancusi, Picasso, Chagall, Kafka, Borges, Joyce, Frida Kahlo, Paul Celan and Fernando Pessoa, to name just a few.
.. By definition, any center is a site of concentration and intensity — after all, it’s the place toward which everybody is attracted in some way or another. That’s also what makes it so formidable. The center possesses a wealth of prospects, opportunities and resources, but also anxieties — it is the place where the possibility of collapse, disintegration or descent into chaos figure prominently. To keep such dangers at bay, life at the center has to be regulated in every detail, its energy well managed, impulses properly channeled and spontaneity standardized. Sophisticated and expensive bureaucracies are developed to make sure that the pursuit of happiness does not turn into a stampede.
.. For all these elaborate protocols are also meant to ensure that not everybody gets in and that enough are left out; this way the center makes itself perpetually desirable.
.. What usually happens as a result is that an inordinate amount of talent, energy and time is spent on figuring out the best ways to elbow one’s way to the core of the mainstream. Then, once there, one has to behave in a way that will never jeopardize one’s position.
.. If the center manages to recruit the marginals to work for its own purposes, then it is saved.
5 Days That Left a Confederate Flag Wavering, and Likely to Fall
With dizzying speed, opponents of the flag blanketed social media. The kind of mass demonstration that, in the past, might have taken a week to organize in front of the State House had coalesced online in several hours, drowning out the flag’s supporters.
.. Within a day, its host, Moveon.org, a liberal advocacy group, told her that it was receiving 5,000 signatures an hour. “I was floored,” Ms. Hunter said.
.. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for The Atlantic who called for the flag’s removal in a series of searing Twitter posts, said the Black Lives Matter movement had created a rapid-response infrastructure that, soon after it was deployed, forced the entire country to confront the morality of the 154-year-old flag.
.. South Carolina’s corporate titans have long held a simple view of the Confederate flag: It was terrible for business.
.. To many of them, it was a source of embarrassment that the N.C.A.A. would not pick South Carolina to host championship events because of the flag, and in the college-sports-crazy state, coaches said it was an obstacle to recruiting.
.. She had held back a swelling tide of emotion for several days, but it was clear that if nothing happened boycotts and other ugliness could follow. Even the chairman of the Republican National Committee was preparing to issue a statement against the flag, potentially isolating Ms. Haley and the state’s other Republican leaders.