Tuesday, April 12, 2016

New York Daily News Resoundingly Endorses Clinton


As readers may recall, Bernie Sanders' interview with the New York Daily News editorial board was more or less a disaster and showed that once Sanders wanders from his favorite sound bites about breaking up the biggest banks, he suddenly is weak on policy and details.  After Sanders' fiasco interview, it's not exactly surprising that the Daily News opted to endorse Hillary Clinton for the presidential primary in New York next Tuesday.  Here are highlights from the endorsement:
Despite the addition of an overly impressive-sounding 14 million jobs and a halving of the unemployment rate over the past six years, American businesses are generating far fewer positions than needed.
Too many are part-time or low-wage. Salaries are largely stagnant. At near-record proportions, millions of American adults have simply checked out of the labor force.
In real and painful terms, families have gotten the shaft. Take the typical household — the one whose paychecks are dead center. In 1999, that family pulled in $57,843. By 2014, its income had fallen to $53,657 — a real-dollars drop of $4,186 a year that could have been spent for housing, medical bills, college tuition, retirement saving and you name it.
Still worse, the middle class is steadily withering. Four decades ago, the backbone of the U.S.A. commanded almost two-thirds of the national income. Today, it clings to just 43% while the top tier has roared ahead to claiming almost half, along with wealth that is fully seven times larger than the holdings of the entire middle class.
At this severe breakpoint, the central challenge confronting the next President is clear: She or he must ignite and rebalance the United States economy in favor of the many while also extending an extra helping hand to ease burdens that have grown too heavy for some.
On April 19, New York Democrats will have unusual say over the party’s nominee. They have in Clinton a superprepared warrior realist. They have in opponent Bernie Sanders a fantasist who’s at passionate war with reality. By choosing Clinton, Empire State Dems would powerfully signal that the party has gotten real about achieving long-sought goals.
Clinton is unsparingly clear-eyed about what’s wrong with America while holding firm to what’s right with America.
She fully understands the toll that adverse economic forces have taken on the country.
She is supremely knowledgeable about the powers a President can wield to lift fortunes in need of lifting.
She possesses the strength and the shrewdness to confront the tough politics of advancing an ambitious Democratic agenda in the White House.
Still more, she is a cauldron-tested globalist who had the spine to give Obama a thumb’s up for taking out Osama Bin Laden and who is far the wiser about the use of American power, having served as secretary of state and seen the consequences of the war in Iraq.
These truths about America’s most well-known public figure are long past debating among Democrats, above all in New York, the state Clinton represented in the U.S. Senate.
Here then the moment has arrived to reckon, instead, with truths about Sanders and his programs:
Subjected to meaningful scrutiny for the first time, the senator from Vermont proved utterly unprepared for the Oval Office while confirming that the central thrusts of his campaign are politically impossible.

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