Barack Obama was clearly one of the most cerebral and well-spoken presidents that the United States has ever had. But as odd as it may seem, two slips of his tongue may have led to the rise of the two worst dictators so far in the 21^st Century.

In 2011, Obama spoke at the White House Correspondents Dinner. One of the guests was Donald Trump. Obama showed little mercy when while looking at Trump, he said, “No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like: Did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” Obama also included a fake video of his birth and an artist’s rendition of what the White House would look like if Trump was president, further embarrassing Trump.

You can see the five-minute video here:

As you might expect, Trump was not pleased by being the butt of the jokes. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said Trump was “pissed off like I’d never seen him before.”

Trump had played around with the idea of running fore president before the 2011 Correspondents Dinner. But the events that evening truly crystallized his hate towards Obama as well as any Democrat who held him in low regard. In June of 2015, Trump announced that he was running for president in 2016. He decimated the rest of the Republican field of candidates and then lost to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million popular votes, but won the outdated and undemocratic Electoral College.

The second faux pas by Obama came in 2014. In March of that year, shortly after Vladimir Putin and Russia had invaded Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, Obama called Russia a “regional power.” Specifically, he said, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness.” Obama describes in in more detail in the following 50-second video:

Knowing what we know now about Putin, it is no surprise that he would be humiliated and outraged at the thought of Russia being called a regional power. After all, his dream as president of Russia was to re-establish the old Soviet Union, with all seventeen republics. He felt that Russia and the Soviet Union had a long and proud history of being a global power and he want to reassert what had been lost at the end of the twentieth century when Mikhail Gorbachev orchestrated to collapse of the Soviet Union in order to give more autonomy to each of the republics.

We cannot say that Obama’s demeaning remarks about Russia caused Putin to bully and ultimately further invade Ukraine in 2022, but it certainly did not help. Putin was also irritated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who repeatedly criticized Putin and Russia for the lack of fair and democratic elections.

Generally, Barack Obama measures his words as well as anyone. You can see it, particularly in his press conferences, when he often pauses between phrases to make sure that the next thing that he says is precisely what he is thinking and not something that he will later regret.

Life is full of ironies, and the fact that Barack Obama may well have significantly contributed to the rise of dictators Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin can be considered unexpected and certainly unfortunate. It is further evidence that we all make mistakes, even when we try our best to avoid them.

The post How Loose Lips from Obama Hurt America and the World appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s been a long and contentious eighteen years since the first Dream Act was introduced in Congress in 2001. The issue of providing a path to legal status for the undocumented youth who were brought to this country as children and grew up here has become one of Washington’s most enduring stalemates. For some of the 1.8 million Dreamers, who have grown up in the shadow of uncertainty and the emotional strain of often over-heated—and sometimes ugly—political sparring, the waiting and hoping has become a burden too heavy to bear.

Many have given up hope. One of the untold stories of this failure to acknowledge the value of these young people and their contribution to American society is that it’s estimated that, since 2005, as many as 500,000 Dreamers between the ages of 18 to 35 have given up, left their families, their homes, and their American dream and returned to Mexico. Remember presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s musings about “self-deportation”? Sadly, those musings seem to be coming true.

To understand the pressures of living with the uncertainties of the vagaries of this political game of now-you-have-it-now-you-don’t, it’s important to take a look back to recall how hopes have been buoyed and then shattered in an unending cycle of dashed dreams. In 2001, even with the support of then-president George W. Bush, the Republican majority in Congress blocked relief for the Dreamers. In 2006, Democrats took back control of the House and Senate. Even with the support of George W. Bush, the Dream Act came up short. In 2010, a version of the Dream Act passed in the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate, with just five votes short of the necessary sixty votes to allow the bill to proceed to a vote.

In 2012, President Obama, his hopes dashed for a bill he could sign to definitively end the burden these young people had been forced to live with, created the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. DACA granted qualifying undocumented youth temporary permission—for renewable two-year periods—to remain legally in the U.S. and to legally be employed. 800,000 young people came out of the shadows and signed on.

In July 2017, another version of the Dream Act was introduced in the Senate by Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Richard Durbin (D-IL) and in the House by Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) and Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL). Let’s be clear. The reason the Dream Act and its various versions have been introduced as legislation so many times over the years is because the concept of granting legal status to Dreamers is supported by the overwhelming majority of American voters. Still, in September of 2017, Donald Trump—in yet another gut punch to majority opinion—announced that his administration was ending the DACA program.

Obama speaks out

Former President Obama couldn’t remain silent in the face of this latest in a long line of cruel reversals. Obama issued a stark and passionate rebuke to Trump’s spurious targeting of young people—young people who contribute to their communities, serve in the military, and prove through the lives they’re living that they have earned a path to legal status.

Here was Obama’s plea:

“These Dreamers are Americans in their hearts, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper. They were brought to this country by their parents, sometimes even as infants. They may not know a country besides ours. They may not even know a language besides English. They often have no idea they’re undocumented until they apply for a job, or college, or a driver’s license.

Over the years, politicians of both parties have worked together to write legislation that would have told these young people—our young people—that if your parents brought you here as a child, if you’ve been here a certain number of years, and if you’re willing to go to college or serve in our military, then you’ll get a chance to stay and earn your citizenship. And for years while I was President, I asked Congress to send me such a bill.

That bill never came. And because it made no sense to expel talented, driven, patriotic young people from the only country they know solely because of the actions of their parents, my administration acted to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people, so that they could continue to contribute to our communities and our country. . . Some 800,000 young people stepped forward, met rigorous requirements, and went through background checks. And America grew stronger as a result.

But today, that shadow has been cast over some of our best and brightest young people once again. To target these young people is wrong — because they have done nothing wrong. It is self-defeating—because they want to start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military, and otherwise contribute to the country we love.”

Reflecting the views of the majority of Americans toward the Dreamers, Obama called on Americans to reaffirm their patriotic sense of decency:

“Ultimately, this is about basic decency. This is about whether we are a people who kick hopeful young strivers out of America, or whether we treat them the way we’d want our own kids to be treated. It’s about who we are as a people — and who we want to be.”

What Dreamers say

In the video below, we meet Dreamers who speak honestly about their sense of loss, their frustration, and their deep reluctance to give up on their American dreams. You’ll meet Joshua Casillas, an accomplished student who dreamed of becoming a doctor in his hometown of Houston, Texas, but instead left home to study medicine at a university in Mexico. For Joshua, the constant stress of the threat of deportation had become too much to bear. As he says, “the future I dreamed of was over.”

We also meet Daniel Arenas, who grew up in South Carolina but, at the age of eighteen, returned to Mexico and founded a non-profit to help other Dreamers pursue their education and find job opportunities.

We also meet Paola Morales, an honors student who reluctantly left her friends and family to go to college in Mexico.

When Dreamers like Joshua, Daniel, and Paola—young people with extraordinary talent, intelligence, drive, and ambition—leave America behind, they are not the losers. America is.

The post Going Back: The Untold Story of Dreamers Returning to Mexico appeared first on Occasional Planet.

One of the lessons of the presidential defeat of the Democrats in 2016 is that Hillary Clinton paid minimal attention to the voters who “had no identity.” We’re actually talking about those who are not part of the mosaic of the identity politics that has become fundamental to the Democratic Party ever since the 1960s.

These people excluded from the mosaic are often known as white, sometimes as poor whites, or even as angry whites. But Donald Trump took a page out of George Wallace and Richard Nixon’s playbook in 1968 and referred to them as “forgotten Americans.” There is nothing demeaning about that and it has the cachet of other identity groups of including a victim status.

But there was a time when the so-called forgotten Americans were in the political tent of the Democratic Party. It was a time when identity was based more on economic well-being rather than ethnic identity. It was at the time that Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1932 and he saw that the route to getting America moving again was not trickle-down economics, but rather priming the pump from the bottom. Having the government be the distributor of income to those who were poor was much more efficient and effective than leaving it to unrestrained capitalists. In fairness to Republicans, it must be said that FDR’s distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt took many steps in his 1901-1909 presidency to curb the abuses of unbridled capitalists.

In his book Listen Liberal, Thomas Frank argues that the Democratic Party has gotten away from its roots as champions of the economically oppressed and become much more concerned about protecting professional classes and ethnic minorities. He wisely points out that there is no logical reason to exclude the “forgotten Americans” from the coalition except that they are an easy punching bag for professionals and minorities. “Forgotten Americans” and those who speak on their behalf are constant fodder for late-night comedians and elitists elsewhere in our society.

Democrats seem to have learned part of the lesson. They are making more of an effort to “talk the talk;” to include “forgotten Americans” in their lists of special interest groups. This is not without difficulty for Democrats. As Thomas Franks points out in his previous book, What’s the Matter with Kansas, “forgotten Americans” are concerned about something besides the economic considerations that were so fundamental to the New Deal and even the Great Society. They have become joined at the hip with so-called “values issues.” Barack Obama may have summed it up best at a time when he thought that he was off-the-record, and he talked about those Americans who “cling to God and their guns.”

What would help Democrats would be if their leaders would do more of “walking the walk” with those among us, of any ethnicity, who are getting short-changed. For Democratic leaders such as Obama and Hillary Clinton, this could mean going back to their roots – what they did in their twenties.

Barack Obama was a community organizer. He walked the streets on the south side of Chicago where tenants were being taken advantage of by the Housing Authority. On a daily basis, he worked with the very people that the New Deal Democratic Party wanted to help.

Certainly, Barack Obama is entitled to a break after the stresses of the presidency, particularly with the vitriolic hate of Republicans like Mitch McConnell. But does there come a time when Obama can step away from the life of fund-raisers and hobnobbing with the likes of Richard Branson and instead live in a world where he is closer to the people who are most in need of the Democratic Party.

In her twenties, Hillary Clinton worked for the Children’s Defense Fund and also as an attorney for the Senate Watergate Committee. She was clearly in the legal trenches for those who were oppressed. Her “Goldwater Girl” days were long past, and she was a champion for social justice.

It is not unprecedented for a former president or presidential candidate to get back in the trenches. Look no further than Plains, Georgia and Jimmy Carter.

What would it say, what would it mean to the Democratic Party and those who run with under its banner if Barack Obama spent a couple of days a month knocking on the doors of economically depressed people and used his legal skills to provide protection for them? What would it mean if Hillary Clinton argued cases for the Children’s Defense Fund?

It would be interesting if Obama and Clinton re-acquainted themselves with “the other America,” if even on a limited basis. The message to Democrats should be that our constituents include everyone, and we never should be above being with “the people.”

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When it comes to future elections, Donald Trump seems blind to them as he continues to litigate his electoral victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. And while Democrats are definitely into strategizing their “wave victories” for 2018 and 2020, they seem to once again be in a fog when it comes to reforming our electoral system.

Currently we are at the halfway point between our quadrennial fixation with the state of Iowa. Can you remember who won the Iowa caucuses two years ago and who is likely to win two years hence? It would seem to be an appropriate time to reflect upon how absurd it is for a state with less than one percent of the nation’s population to have such disjointed significance in determining who America’s choices will be when it comes to selecting our presidential nominees.

In case you forgot, after Iowa comes New Hampshire, with less than half the population of Iowa. But like Iowa, it is almost exclusively white – a far cry from the modern demographic mosaic of America. Yet presidencies are made and lost in the Granite State where a single slip-up, or tear-drop, can doom a candidate (witness Ed Muskie in 1972).

There is nothing engraved in stone about the order of the states for the presidential sweepstakes. It is also not required that the Democrats and Republican follow the same schedule. The Republicans rarely make claims about promoting fairness and equity in the electoral process, and since their vision is generally in the direction of the rear-view mirror rather than ahead, they can remain comfortable with the system as it is.

Democrats pay lip-service to enhancing democracy. When it comes to voting rights, they do the walk as well as the talk. Thank goodness for that, and most recently Senator Doug Jones of Alabama wants to thank you.

But it was barely a year ago that Barack Obama and Eric Holder were talking about structural changes to our political system to make our playing field more level. Specifically, they wanted to do battle with the forces that support gerrymandering, a system of disproportionate representation in legislative districts that in recent years has strongly favored Republicans.

I have not heard much from either of them about that, and perhaps they are still in the “think-tank” phase because the state legislatures that redraw the districts won’t take office until January of 2021.

But it is not too early, in fact it may be too late, to address the irrational undemocratic system of primaries and caucuses that Democrats utilize select their presidential nominee. Let’s just innumerate a few of the ways in which it is undemocratic:

1. Caucuses (such as in Iowa) can involve less than 2% of voters. And to make it particularly convenient for interested voters, the caucuses are held on cold wintry nights. It’s as if Putin wanted to secure his nomination by a select number of Siberians in January.
2. Primaries and caucuses favor the candidates with the most amount of money. The candidates shill “supporters” from around the country to pour money into races in small states. Much of the money is spent on distorting or grossly self-serving TV commercials. Issues are like an after-thought.
3. Endorsements mean a great deal in primaries. Is there any correlation between endorsements and the quality of the candidates? Doubt it.

There are many alternatives to the system that we have. These include:

1. A series of regional primaries, perhaps four of them spread over several months. The order of these primaries could vary. The key is that no small state or group of states would have an advantage over others.
2. Self-imposed limits on money raised and spent on campaigns. Republicans may like it and they would not have to play by these rules. But Democrats could, and it would show that they are the responsible party with money and that their constituency is the broad base of voters rather than a donor class.

Let’s make this simple. Suppose that you want to explain to a fifth-grade student how the president is chosen in the United States. Would you start with Iowa and New Hampshire? I don’t think so. You would talk about interested citizens running in fair elections until on a final winner is determined by a popular election in November.

Come on President Obama and A-G Holder. Let’s get on it now. It’s clean, workable, sensible and necessary. No time to spare.

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There are two key reasons why mainstream media must be talking about Medicare-for-All. First, it is sound policy, something that all Americans should hope for in truly finding affordable and accessible health care for all. Second, it is the Democrats’ position (though often muted) which stands in opposition to the Republicans’ “Repeal and Replace” Obamacare, or even simply “Repeal.”

Democrats acknowledge that the Affordable Care Act requires fixing. Most of what needs fixing is what was initially left out if the bill in 2009-2010 because (a) President Obama did not think that he could ask for that much, and (b) Republicans stood in firm opposition to it. The first step would be a public option, a proposal to create a government-run health insurance agency that would compete with other private health insurance companies within the United States. Because the public exchange would not need to charge consumers (taxpayers) the twenty percent overhead for private insurers’’ profit, it would immediately reduce costs and by its very nature, apply to everyone.

Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson both supported some form of Medicare-for-All. But without presidential leadership, it took until 2003 for Representatives John Conyers (D-MI) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and others to introduce H.R. 676, a simple six-page bill which would establish a single-payer or Medicare-for-All system. But as we have previously reported, the media paid scant attention to the proposal when Dennis Kucinich ran for president in 2008 against the likes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both of whom were offering “universal-lite” coverage.

In the 2016 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders forced the media to cover what was the linchpin to his health-care program. Unfortunately, for many in the media Sanders has become “yesterday’s news,” and along with his partial black-out is a silencing of many of the progressive proposals that he advocated. In fairness, very few Democrats in office have taken up his mantle, even though it was clearly more popular with voters than Hillary Clinton’s milquetoast.

An example of neither the media nor a mainstream Democrat adding Medicare-for-All to a conversation was on CNN’s “New Day” on Monday, July 3. Guest host John Berman was interviewing Maryland Senator Ben Cardin about the question of whether Democrats were willing to work with Republicans on health care reform. [I wish that I could give you a link to this interview, but CNN is notoriously bad in providing access to recently-aired clips or interviews.]. Berman asked Cardin whether Senate Democrats were willing to work with Republicans and the Maryland senator gave the requisite answer that in theory Democrats would collaborate, but it did not seem realistic presently because of the huge gulf that separates the two parties on health care. But what Cardin did not say, and what Berman did not ask about was exactly what Democrats stand for. Had he been asked that, I am not sure whether Cardin would have proposed first aid for ACA, or even mentioned that government subsidies needed to be greater to meet escalating medical costs.

All of that is confusing. Medicare-for-All is not. It is something that should be asked about and talked about.

When the main issue before us was gay marriage, members of the mainstream media did not hesitate to ask politicians whether they were for marriage equality. That was a clear question which lent itself to clear and precise answers.

The media has not done so with Medicare-for-All. It is time they do so because (a) it is good journalism to do so, and (b) their personal lives and that of the society in which they live will be better off with it.

UPDATE: On Sunday, July 9, 2019,”The Hill” reported “Single-payer healthcare gains traction with Dems”

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I’ve yet to find anyone who shares my feelings, but I was quite uncomfortable with former President Barack Obama’s first public speaking opportunity upon retirement. He was on a panel at the University of Chicago that focused on community activism.

He had been off the public stage for some time and we all knew that he was taking deserved time off for R & R. He had spent part of the time on a yacht in Tahiti as well as palling around with British venturist and billionaire Richard Branson in the Bahamas. He was definitely living “the high life” and the argument that he is entitled to do whatever he wants certainly holds water. But somehow the gap between Chicago community activism and Tahiti seemed too big for me.

As I reflected upon living former Democratic presidents, I could not help but notice the contrast between the lives that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have lived. Yes, both have been very involved in charitable enterprises to help those in need, primarily in Africa, Asia and South America. But Clinton’s work with the Clinton Global Initiative has been very glitzy and with the glitterati. Carter’s work through the Carter Center has been very hands on and with dirty hands. He lives a very unpretentious life back in Atlanta and Plains, GA. He interacts daily with people who live very non-assuming lives and who are well-connected with the struggles that middle and low-income people face in the United States and around the world.

Like so many people, I was taken with Barack Obama when I read Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. This unassuming man was concerned with reaching his own potential while serving the common good. Upon graduating from law school, he passed up opportunities to work on Wall Street and instead worked to serve the people in Chicago who he had previously come to know as a community organizer. He later became a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

As a candidate for president, he initially supported the public financing of campaigns. During his 2008 campaign, he learned that his popularity was not only with grassroots people, but also with large financial interests. For him to maximize revenue for his campaign, it behooved him to take a pass on public financing and instead take as much as he legally could from entrenched sources including Wall Street. When he became president, he took care of Wall Street while also working for the economic and social advances of the middle class and those in poverty.

I can’t help but wonder how Barack Obama’s presidency and possibly his post-presidency would be had there been a strong public financing program in place for running for president, with strict penalties for refusing to take the public route. It is certainly likely that Obama would have had less contact with the moguls of Wall Street. It is possible that during his presidency Wall Street would not have escaped with only one culprit of the 2007-08 economic demise having gone to prison.

Sometimes circumstances cause us to lose our grounding. It’s presumptuous of me or anyone else to claim that we know anyone else’s grounding. What I am comfortable saying is that I would feel better if Barack Obama was more in touch with those with whom he worked on the south side of Chicago than those on the Street. He’s young and his post-presidency cannot be defined in 100 days.

I’m hoping that he takes more pages out of Jimmy Carter’s book and fewer out of Bill Clinton’s.

The post Could Obama learn from Jimmy Carter about presidential retirement? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

One of many great ironies of Trump is that after the Republicans spent eight years blasting Obama for disgracing the presidency and criticizing him and his family for being unfit for the White House, they put into office a man and family whose personal lives have been filed with scandal and are a total embarrassment.

Matt Taibbi, who has been highly critical of many of Obama’s policies, comes to this conclusion in an article entitled, “President Obama’s Last Stand” in Rolling Stone:

There are a lot of people these days wondering if the election of the race-baiting Donald Trump will end up staining or outright repudiating the legacy of Barack Obama. I think it will be the other way around. Trump’s presidency is almost sure to throw the best qualities of this unique and powerful historical figure into relief. . .

It’s Obama who has been the great model for young men of his generation. And ten years from now, when the millions of young people who grew up during his presidency start to enter the workforce and become leaders and parents, we’ll see more clearly what he meant to this country. . .

Donald Trump may have won the White House, but he will never be a man like his predecessor, whose personal example will now only shine more brightly with the passage of time. At a time when a lot of Americans feel like they have little to be proud of, we should think about our outgoing president, whose humanity and greatness are probably only just now coming into true focus.

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What happens when a narcissist is overwhelmed with kindness? I really can’t call Donald Trump a narcissist since I am not a trained therapist and I have never examined him. But using the word narcissist is a lot easier than saying “a person who appears to an ordinary layman to have narcissistic tendencies.”

There is no need to run down the litany of insults that he has thrown to virtually everyone who has registered on his radar screen, but recently the two people who have most been in his crosshairs are President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

For both of them, the results of the 2016 presidential election were extremely painful. It would be understandable of either of them had lashed out at Trump, at the media, at the voters, at the system, and virtually anything and everything that might have had something to do with the crushing defeat for the Democrats. But neither of them did, at least publicly.

In her concession remarks, Secretary Clinton said, “Last night I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans.”

Later that day, President Obama said, “Because we are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country. The peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy. And over the next few months, we are going to show that to the world.”

Compare the words of Clinton and Obama with those of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell shortly after President Obama was elected. He said that his number-one goal was to make sure that Barack Obama was a one-term president.”

McConnell did not reach his goal of making Obama a single-term president, but in the long-run, he may have won the war. He and his House colleagues blocked virtually everything that the President wanted to achieve with Congressional approval. What they didn’t stop, they aim to reverse upon Trump’s ascension to power.

There is no easy path as to how others might best respond to Donald Trump the president, nor is there to how to respond to those who voted for him. We do know that there was and is a tremendous amount of anger within them.  This raises two key questions:

1. What made them angry?
2. Why did they channel so much of it towards Hillary Clinton as they did?

There are no clear answers, but in coming posts we are going to try to explore what they might be. In the past we have written about the Republican Brain. Certainly the last eighteen months have taught us more about it, but if progressives had a good idea of how to tend to the Republican Brain, we wouldn’t be in the fix that we’re in now.

There are those who think that the societal causes which influence a person to be narcissistic include a lack of warm parenting and a lack of warm friendships. The “cures” to narcissism are few and far between. We might think that we could try to “kill Trump with kindness,” but that seems have never worked with him and the rough and tumble of politics and government is no place to start.

But this should not cause is to lower our own standards for decency and compassion. Secretary Clinton and President Obama set the examples for us. We probably won’t change Trump, but what can we do to make his followers less angry and obstinate? The answer is not for us to become that way, but rather to try to better understand what frustrates them and what they do with that frustration. We have a little time now, so let’s engage in a little reflection.

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Soon after Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, he convened an economic summit in his home town of Little Rock, AR. He saw the biggest challenge that he would face upon assuming the presidency would be to jump-start the economy.

If Hillary Clinton is elected this November 8, and if there is no gratuitous challenge to the results from one Donald Trump, then she too will likely work to make good use of the transition period, the time between Election Day and the inauguration on January 20, 2017.

Candidates are generally cautious in talking about the transition prior to the election, but we know that they all do. Similarly, journalists, pundits, bloggers as well as lobbyists and potential job seekers engage in the parlor game well before the election even takes place.

Here are three suggestions for items of study that could be very beneficial to a President-elect Clinton during the transition.

1. Counseling about her propensity for secretiveness and non-transparency
2. Advice from President Obama on how he minimized corruption in his administration for eight years.
3. Discussion with futurists about how technological and social changes in the economy may lessen the demand for jobs performed by humans and what can be done to begin transition to a “fourth-wave” economy.

Suggestion number one may seem jarring. Let me clarify that I mean counseling in the generic sense, seeking and receiving advice. While it may be that Clinton could benefit greatly from professional counseling on her defenses (as most of the rest of us might at some points in our life), it would not be politically helpful for her to enter therapy at this time. But what would be acceptable and very helpful would be for her to seek out friends and others who have expressed concern about her repeated instances of “getting behind the curve” because she is slow to disclose. In many ways, this could be less risky than assumed because thirty years of evidence has shown that despite numerous extensive investigations, she has never been found guilty of any major transgression.

But despite a career record of honesty that far exceeds most politicians, it cannot be denied that millions of Americans do not see her as trustworthy. Yes, part of this can be attributed to the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” but she has repeatedly provided them with fodder to continuously advance this meme. Hillary Clinton needs to sit down for some conversation from which she might want to get up and leave, but it would do her well to engage. It is not necessary for her to understand any or all of the psychological reasons why she “clams up” and does not disclose. What is necessary is for her to have close advisors who can tell her when a lack of disclosure portends poorly for her and how to actually disclose in a timely and willing fashion. It does not have to be that different from a parent reminding an adolescent who has been a little carefree with money to make sure that he or she gets correct change after a cash transaction. In the case of Ms. Clinton, she must go through a checklist of presidential items where without change she might opt for less transparent than is necessary. The follow-up would be for her to seriously consider alternative actions that would allow her to stay in front of the curve.

President Obama could probably give her good advice in this regard and also tips on keeping her administration as “clean” as possible. No other president in modern history has been as scandal free as Barack Obama. There are a few tricks to his trade, such as not hiring former lobbyists onto the White House staff (a promise generally well-kept). Hillary Clinton would do well to look for fresh faces. As a way of better connecting with those who currently support Trump, she might want to go a little lighter on politicians and even academics. A labor secretary who is union-bred would be very helpful as would a transportation secretary who has not been a mogul. She would do well to follow advice from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on consumer and fair practices issue. A clear break with “business as usual” would be very helpful to her.

Finally, Clinton would do well to consult with futurists on how society is changing. Her husband rode the “Third Wave” (the initial digital age) that Alvin Toffler wrote about in 1970 in Future Shock. In many ways, it is remarkable that unemployment in the United States is only 5% in light of the out-sourcing, automation and computerization we have experienced since the 1990s. But we are now seeing on the horizon a new wave of inventions and practices that will potentially eliminate jobs in an unprecedented fashion. Will driverless cars mean the end of truck, bus and cab drivers? Will computers be able to do new forms of analysis and interpretation such as reading X-rays? Is the teaching profession further endangered by computerized learning? Will the metal fabrication of tomorrow be so automated that we will hardly remember what steelworkers were?

The bigger question is: What will human beings do when there are fewer and fewer jobs? How will we “earn our keep?” In one sense we will all be richer because more goods and services will be available. But what if that happens without us earning money? Do we need to re-define jobs and do we need to think of income as opposed to salaries or wages?

These are difficult questions, but addressing them becomes more urgent every day. It would behoove Clinton, if she becomes president, to look well beyond the twenty-four-hour news cycle or even the trade deals of today and look at the trade winds of how humankind is changing as we move further into the twenty-first century.

There will be little time to wax philosophical about these three issues once Clinton takes office.  She needs to quickly redefine what it means to be the “best and the brightest” and how she can most effectively be part of that.

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Every quarter, Factcheck.org likes to take a look at the numbers since Obama became President. They go deeper than just unemployment and study metrics like corporate profits, the number of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and how other countries view the U.S. Here’s a look at where we stand in July 2016, with just a few months of his presidency left.

The post Obama’s numbers appeared first on Occasional Planet.