Hillary's New Deal

Hillary's New Deal: How a Clinton Presidency Could Transform America

This is the choice Americans face – between alternatives as starkly opposed to each other as in any election in our history, excepting the one in 1860, which led to the Civil War.

There on the convention stage was Sanders himself, railing against "the 40-year decline of our middle class" and "the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality that we currently experience." There was Sen. Elizabeth Warren, explaining how the system is rigged for CEOs and predators like Trump. And there, too, was Hillary Clinton, proclaiming that "Democrats are the party of working people," but the party needed to show it better; then saying, "Our economy isn't working the way it should because our democracy isn't working the way it should"; and touting a government program funded by targeted tax hikes on the rich, the "biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II," to rebuild America's infrastructure.

Clinton's program for battling economic inequality is another series of reinventions in the broad New Deal tradition. Her proposals include middle-class tax credits to be covered by raising taxes on the very wealthiest Americans and by closing tax loopholes; raising the federal minimum wage by 66 percent to $12 an hour, while supporting a $15 minimum in individual cities and states; protecting labor unions' collective-bargaining rights; and reducing child-care costs. To address the problems of climate change unimaginable to earlier generations, she has called for the installation of half a billion solar panels by the end of her first term, with the goal of providing clean renewable energy to every household in the country by 2027.

Unfair Coverage

Unfair To A Woman

Running for president is both exhausting and stressful; in 2004, John Kerry also came down with pneumonia during his presidential campaign. 

Clinton's e-mails now rival the Watergate scandal as one of the most reported stories in political history.

The offensive against Hillary Clinton fits into the context of a much larger cultural and political assault: the Republican-led "War on Women," a term that's been maligned and in some ways overused, but nonetheless speaks to the lengthy and concerted effort on the part of the GOP to control women's bodies and wages in order to reduce women's power. It's mostly forgotten that Republicans, not Democrats, were the original champions of women's rights: leading the charge for women's suffrage and also backing the Equal Rights Amendment from its inception in 1923 to its proposed ratification in 1972. This changed toward the end of the Nixon administration, which seized the opportunity to exploit cultural fears of women's liberation – much in the way it embraced racism in the South – for political gain.

If the State Department e-mails reveal anything, it's evidence of the kind of garden-variety access and favoritism that, unappealing and corrosive as it may be, is not only what Washington runs on, but what most industries run on, including journalism. Perhaps a more damning example of favoritism would be what Vice President Dick Cheney showed for Halliburton, the company he once ran, which went on to become one of the main profiteers of the Iraq War that Cheney so aggressively pushed for. Halliburton, dogged by allegations of corrupt billing practices, made $39 billion off Iraq. Cheney, accused of many things, including pay for play, rarely saw his capacity to lead called into question.

Feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan is fascinated by the dislike that young women, in particular, seem to have for Hillary Clinton. "They project on her the same kind of contempt they used on each other in seventh grade," she says. "And when you ask why, you hear, well, it's e-mails. It's that she stayed with Bill Clinton. But the reasons they give never explain the intensity of the dislike – and what's more, there's permission for that; they don't have to explain it."

"This entire race is about gender," says Gilligan, who continues to marvel at how many obstacles exist for women in America. "Those are the issues that are playing out now, through Hillary Clinton."