On Not Voting your Self-Interest

        A familiar pattern is again on display Super Tuesday.  Middle and working class Americans voted either for Trump or Hillary Clinton. While both White and African-American middle class incomes have been level or worse the past twenty years, they voted for Hillary whose husband created NAFTA, moving hundreds of thousands of jobs out of the U.S.  African-Americans, led by the Civil Rights hero John Lewis, seem to be fighting the last war, ignoring Bernie Sanders mantra that you can’t reform Wall Street if you’re taking their money. With 745,000 African American men currently in prison and fifty percent Black youth unemployment one has to hope that Bernie Sanders’ economic justice and independence message could attract more African Americans. It may yet. 

        Donald Trump’s “managerial skills” cast doubt on any capacity he may have for any commitments he may have to raise all the ships. See the Taj Mahal story.

        The New York Times block-buster investigative reports this week document Mrs. Clinton’s role in Libya as Secretary of State. They appeared just before Super Tuesday (click below to access the full texts) but went largely unreported on PBS and the cable networks MSNBC and CNN.  The dynamite in the reports shows Mrs. Clinton repeating her vote for invading Iraq by urging military intervention in Libya. Channeling George Bush’s infamous aircraft carrier celebration of Iraq, “Secretary Clinton appeared at the National Defense University with Leon E. Panetta, who had recently replaced Mr. Gates as defense secretary. She hailed the intervention as a case study in “smart power.”

Mrs. Clinton had taken a triumphal tour of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, and for weeks top aides had been circulating a “ticktock” that described her starring role in the events that had led to this moment. The timeline, her top policy aide, Jake Sullivan, wrote, demonstrated Mrs. Clinton’s “leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country’s Libya policy from start to finish.” The memo’s language put her at the center of everything: “HRC announces … HRC directs … HRC travels … HRC engages,” it read.

Later Mrs. Clinton would be mostly a bystander as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.

 The Times series this week has this cautionary section for all to ponder;

This is the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have doomed her first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for military action in another Muslim country. As she once again seeks the White House, campaigning in part on her experience as the nation’s chief diplomat, an examination of the intervention she championed shows her at what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state. It is a working portrait rich with evidence of what kind of president she might be, and especially of her expansive approach to the signal foreign-policy conundrum of today: whether, when and how the United States should wield its military power in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.