Living in a swing state has its ups and downs--no pun intended. But swings work best when the ropes aren't twisted. Here's how to untwist the latest national ads targeted to Ohio and the like.
The children! Hillary cares about the children! Children are our future. They're innocent. They need protection, and if you're on the fence about who to vote for, this is Clinton's play to make you think she's the person to do it. She's been working at it her whole life, apparently. We have footage of her talking about making sure the future's bright for all children, all the while implying that her political opponent is not. Well, if he's not anti-children, then at least he's a racist xenophobe who doesn't want success in life for "all" children like Hillary does.
Does this stuff actually convince anybody? There's no content in this ad, only branding. There's no concrete ideas on how to protect children and give them their best chances in life, just footage of her asserting that it's important.
What are Mrs. Clinton's ideas on how to protect children and give them there best chances in life? Well, for those interested, she wrote an entire book on the subject: It Takes a Village. Although she makes many points that family-values conservatives would find familiar, their purpose is carefully distorted. The main premises of the book are that families are important to a child's development (sound good so far?); that families are not isolated, but embedded into communities which help in areas where individual families are not sufficient for the needs of the children (still sound okay?); and that the federal government's role is to provide for the needs of all the families who don't fit its norm and enforce its own standards within communities because families can't do it all, and because the children's future doesn't really belong to the parents anyway, but to society, which the federal government represents (woah! If she had come out and said that in the ad, there'd be little support!).
Hillary Clinton's main political philosophy--her ideas--are inverted. Rather than conceiving of a limited government that provides a guarantee of the basic human rights of everyone so that parents are free to pursue their childrens' welfare and their own definition of happiness, Clinton wants to expand government so that it limits parental freedom to do so. She cleverly does it in the name of "standards" for the children, but its true focus is the concentration of power in federal hands.
Maybe that doesn't strike you as particularly dangerous. It should, but if you're on the fence and thinking "isn't supporting family leave, early intervention, welfare, and equality for all children, especially those who haven't had a great start to life or have a rough home situation a good thing?" the idea of a government stepping in for this kind of thing might sound good to you. And therein lies the big lie--you've been rooked into thinking her political opponents are against such. They're not, and never have been. The big difference is not in the debate on how to best support children and families, it's in who decides. Hillary wants the "standards" to be federally imposed. Conservatives support safety nets for those that have no other options, but we understand that no outside agency can remove responsibility for children's growth from the home. We understand that when the feds impose a "standard" it always at the cost of imposing an upper limit on opportunity. We want people to be free and prosperous so that they have the means to be charitable and support their communities. We want the government to support the prosperity by getting out of its way, and by allowing us to keep our earnings so we can support our local causes. Just because we don't think the feds should be the ones in charge of everything doesn't mean we don't support more local efforts and somehow don't think we should organize as a society for the support of the less fortunate. One of the underlying lies in this Hillary ad is that the federal government doesn't just represent society, but it is society, and has the right to make everyone's decisions for them.
Most importantly, conservatives are results-oriented, not utopian. We understand that progressivism produces the opposite of its stated intent. For example, Hilary touts 8 million children being added to health insurance rolls because of her Health Care reforms in the 90s. Do you remember how that was accomplished? It was the only success she could salvage from her bigger ask of universal health care. Congress wouldn't bite for that whole rotten enchilada, but they did submit to an incremental move: they would allow a law requiring health insurance companies to cover "children" of up to age 26 under their parents' policies. And what has been the result of this new law? Partly because more people were required to be covered, prices for insurance premiums have skyrocketed since the 90s, eventually creating part of the crisis into which disastrous and failing Obamacare stepped as a "solution". She may have helped cover 8 million people, but within a decade many times that number of children people were priced out of the health insurance market because of her policy of central imposition of "standards".
If instead you allow states, and more local forms of community decide on their own standards, you allow those closest to the problems, most aware of the needs, and most responsible and accountable to use the resources wisely to handle the issue. States that allow, for example, for competition between out-of-state insurance companies have lower premiums, and more poeple are insured for health care. Also, states which allow more choices in minimum coverage have lower premiums. When you let the people closest to the problem decide, rather than attempt to impose a federal "standard", the higher standards you are after get met better and faster. Get the government out of our families' way, let them keep more of their earnings to invest in their children as they will, and the children are better educated, better prepared for adult life, and make better citizens than where liberal collectivist threats of force bear sway.
Also, speaking of Health Care. This next ad touts Obamacare, among other things, as a triumph of bipartisan diplomacy and compromise. It's the perfect solution found by working together, which Trump, as a bombastic troglodyte of intransigence is, by implication, simply incapable of.
Here's the full ad:
First of all, does she really expect people to believe that a businessman with a $4B+ fortune to his name has no negotiation skill? Has no acumen for finding the best compromise among factions with competing interests so that their cooperative work can produce hotels, casinos, or bigger projects? If she's casting herself as a better deal-maker than Trump, she's got an uphill battle there.
But leaving that aside, she's simply factually wrong about how we got Obamacare passed. Democrats used a parliamentary trick to ram it through the Senate, which they controlled but still couldn't get through normal procedures with for lack of support. Then, they bought off the last senator or two, and voilà: a behemoth of epic failing proportions. Hilary expects us to believe this was an example of working together with the other side?
And how about her other examples: were we all together after 911? For the few weeks it took for Congress to get a resolution on war powers to the President, yes. And from that point on--after supporting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq--Hillary and the Democrats opposed Republicans with every tool in their arsenal and rode to power on the public amnesia about their cooperative "working together" with the GOP on support for the wars.
Finally, of course she wants to claim a treaty reducing Russia's nuclear arsenal as a personal success, because it was signed during her tenure as Secretary of State. But she's counting on us forgetting the details of the deal: we reduced double the amount Russia did, and Russia wasn't bound to any confirmation that they actually held up their end. In other words, the deal was binding on us, not on them. The deal was raw, and conservatives opposed it as such, but didn't have the votes to stop it.
Ultimately, we have to trust that ads like these will be seen for what they are, and that people will make wise choices about their leaders. I just wish Clinton would come out straight with her ideas, stop twisting her opponents' ideas as well as her own record, and just let the best ideas win. One thing is positive: our country needs and deserves better governing ideas.
The children! Hillary cares about the children! Children are our future. They're innocent. They need protection, and if you're on the fence about who to vote for, this is Clinton's play to make you think she's the person to do it. She's been working at it her whole life, apparently. We have footage of her talking about making sure the future's bright for all children, all the while implying that her political opponent is not. Well, if he's not anti-children, then at least he's a racist xenophobe who doesn't want success in life for "all" children like Hillary does.
Does this stuff actually convince anybody? There's no content in this ad, only branding. There's no concrete ideas on how to protect children and give them their best chances in life, just footage of her asserting that it's important.
What are Mrs. Clinton's ideas on how to protect children and give them there best chances in life? Well, for those interested, she wrote an entire book on the subject: It Takes a Village. Although she makes many points that family-values conservatives would find familiar, their purpose is carefully distorted. The main premises of the book are that families are important to a child's development (sound good so far?); that families are not isolated, but embedded into communities which help in areas where individual families are not sufficient for the needs of the children (still sound okay?); and that the federal government's role is to provide for the needs of all the families who don't fit its norm and enforce its own standards within communities because families can't do it all, and because the children's future doesn't really belong to the parents anyway, but to society, which the federal government represents (woah! If she had come out and said that in the ad, there'd be little support!).
Hillary Clinton's main political philosophy--her ideas--are inverted. Rather than conceiving of a limited government that provides a guarantee of the basic human rights of everyone so that parents are free to pursue their childrens' welfare and their own definition of happiness, Clinton wants to expand government so that it limits parental freedom to do so. She cleverly does it in the name of "standards" for the children, but its true focus is the concentration of power in federal hands.
Maybe that doesn't strike you as particularly dangerous. It should, but if you're on the fence and thinking "isn't supporting family leave, early intervention, welfare, and equality for all children, especially those who haven't had a great start to life or have a rough home situation a good thing?" the idea of a government stepping in for this kind of thing might sound good to you. And therein lies the big lie--you've been rooked into thinking her political opponents are against such. They're not, and never have been. The big difference is not in the debate on how to best support children and families, it's in who decides. Hillary wants the "standards" to be federally imposed. Conservatives support safety nets for those that have no other options, but we understand that no outside agency can remove responsibility for children's growth from the home. We understand that when the feds impose a "standard" it always at the cost of imposing an upper limit on opportunity. We want people to be free and prosperous so that they have the means to be charitable and support their communities. We want the government to support the prosperity by getting out of its way, and by allowing us to keep our earnings so we can support our local causes. Just because we don't think the feds should be the ones in charge of everything doesn't mean we don't support more local efforts and somehow don't think we should organize as a society for the support of the less fortunate. One of the underlying lies in this Hillary ad is that the federal government doesn't just represent society, but it is society, and has the right to make everyone's decisions for them.
Most importantly, conservatives are results-oriented, not utopian. We understand that progressivism produces the opposite of its stated intent. For example, Hilary touts 8 million children being added to health insurance rolls because of her Health Care reforms in the 90s. Do you remember how that was accomplished? It was the only success she could salvage from her bigger ask of universal health care. Congress wouldn't bite for that whole rotten enchilada, but they did submit to an incremental move: they would allow a law requiring health insurance companies to cover "children" of up to age 26 under their parents' policies. And what has been the result of this new law? Partly because more people were required to be covered, prices for insurance premiums have skyrocketed since the 90s, eventually creating part of the crisis into which disastrous and failing Obamacare stepped as a "solution". She may have helped cover 8 million people, but within a decade many times that number of children people were priced out of the health insurance market because of her policy of central imposition of "standards".
If instead you allow states, and more local forms of community decide on their own standards, you allow those closest to the problems, most aware of the needs, and most responsible and accountable to use the resources wisely to handle the issue. States that allow, for example, for competition between out-of-state insurance companies have lower premiums, and more poeple are insured for health care. Also, states which allow more choices in minimum coverage have lower premiums. When you let the people closest to the problem decide, rather than attempt to impose a federal "standard", the higher standards you are after get met better and faster. Get the government out of our families' way, let them keep more of their earnings to invest in their children as they will, and the children are better educated, better prepared for adult life, and make better citizens than where liberal collectivist threats of force bear sway.
Also, speaking of Health Care. This next ad touts Obamacare, among other things, as a triumph of bipartisan diplomacy and compromise. It's the perfect solution found by working together, which Trump, as a bombastic troglodyte of intransigence is, by implication, simply incapable of.
Here's the full ad:
First of all, does she really expect people to believe that a businessman with a $4B+ fortune to his name has no negotiation skill? Has no acumen for finding the best compromise among factions with competing interests so that their cooperative work can produce hotels, casinos, or bigger projects? If she's casting herself as a better deal-maker than Trump, she's got an uphill battle there.
But leaving that aside, she's simply factually wrong about how we got Obamacare passed. Democrats used a parliamentary trick to ram it through the Senate, which they controlled but still couldn't get through normal procedures with for lack of support. Then, they bought off the last senator or two, and voilà: a behemoth of epic failing proportions. Hilary expects us to believe this was an example of working together with the other side?
And how about her other examples: were we all together after 911? For the few weeks it took for Congress to get a resolution on war powers to the President, yes. And from that point on--after supporting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq--Hillary and the Democrats opposed Republicans with every tool in their arsenal and rode to power on the public amnesia about their cooperative "working together" with the GOP on support for the wars.
Finally, of course she wants to claim a treaty reducing Russia's nuclear arsenal as a personal success, because it was signed during her tenure as Secretary of State. But she's counting on us forgetting the details of the deal: we reduced double the amount Russia did, and Russia wasn't bound to any confirmation that they actually held up their end. In other words, the deal was binding on us, not on them. The deal was raw, and conservatives opposed it as such, but didn't have the votes to stop it.
Ultimately, we have to trust that ads like these will be seen for what they are, and that people will make wise choices about their leaders. I just wish Clinton would come out straight with her ideas, stop twisting her opponents' ideas as well as her own record, and just let the best ideas win. One thing is positive: our country needs and deserves better governing ideas.
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