title: Why This New Book By Lib Writer And Radio Host Will Send Shock Waves Through The Democrat Party
text: Maybe the  Queen of Incompetence  isn t as popular as she had hoped with the Socialist Party of America, aka the former Democrat Party It s not just Republicans who get riled by the thought of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton ascending to the presidency. Some people on the left lock horns over Clinton often enough to suggest that Team Hillary still has a long way to go before she has shored up the traditional base of progressive voters.A controversial book cover is the latest flashpoint to lay bare the divisions in the Democratic base over the Clinton candidacy. The forthcoming book,  My Turn,  by Nation Magazine Contributing Editor Doug Henwood, critiques the former secretary of state s decades-long political career, calling out her foreign policy positions and purported connections to big-money interests, among other contentious points.And the book cover s flamboyant illustration   featuring a stoic Hillary Clinton, in a blood-red dress, pointing a gun at the reader   has sparked a heated debate among her supporters and detractors.Salon editor Joan Walsh and former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett both called the drawing  gross. The leftist rag Salon.com has this to say about the new Hillary Clinton book: A stink bomb into liberals  certainty : Doug Henwood on his anti-Clinton crusade.Here is a portion of Salon.com s review of Henwood s  My Turn  book:In this regard, Harper s latest (paywalled) cover story   a cri de coeur against Hillary Clinton from economist, radio host, author and Left Business Observer founder Doug Henwood   is no exception. A mix of biography and political analysis, Henwood s essay depicts the likely 2016 presidential candidate as a relatively unaccomplished conformist and careerist, one who s far more interested in acquiring power (and protecting the interests of her wealthy funders) than making real the progressive vision.  What is the case for Hillary?  Henwood asks.  It s hard to find any substantive political argument in her favor. Even the author and the artist have different takes on the imagery. People often see in texts what they want to see. The reaction to this cover, which has been circulating less than 48 hours, has been a vivid reminder of this,  Henwood told MSNBC.  When I first saw the design I knew it would attract a lot of attention.   But I couldn t have predicted the diversity of reactions. Where Henwood sees  ruthlessness and hawkishness,  in the image, the artist, Sarah Sole told the International Business Times she sees it as  pulpy and sexy. Henwood is a well-known Clinton critic on the left who skewered the former secretary of state, senator and first lady in a controversial 2014 Harper s Magazine cover story titled  Stop Hillary.  In it he wrote:What is the case for Hillary (whose quasi-official website identifies her, in bold blue letters, by her first name only, as do millions upon millions of voters)? It boils down to this: She has experience, she s a woman, and it s her turn. It s hard to find any substantive political argument in her favor. She has, in the past, been associated with women s issues, with children s issues   but she also encouraged her husband to sign the 1996 bill that put an end to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC), which had been in effect since 1935. Indeed, longtime Clinton adviser Dick Morris, who has now morphed into a right-wing pundit, credits Hillary for backing both of Bill s most important moves to the center: the balanced budget and welfare reform.1 And during her subsequent career as New York s junior senator and as secretary of state, she has scarcely budged from the centrist sweet spot, and has become increasingly hawkish on foreign policy.What Hillary will deliver, then, is more of the same. And that shouldn t surprise us. As wacky as it sometimes appears on the surface, American politics has an amazing stability and continuity about it. Obama, widely viewed as a populist action hero during the 2008 campaign, made no bones about his admiration for Ronald Reagan. The Gipper, he said,changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt [that] with all the excesses of the Sixties and the Seventies, government had grown and grown, but there wasn t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating.Now, the  excesses of the Sixties and the Seventies  included things like feminism, gay liberation, the antiwar movement, a militant civil rights movement   all good things, in my view, but I know that many people disagree. In any case, coming into office with something like a mandate, Obama never tried to make a sharp political break with the past, as Reagan did from the moment of his first inaugural address. Reagan dismissed the postwar Keynesian consensus   the idea that government had a responsibility to soften the sharpest edges of capitalism by fighting recession and providing some sort of basic safety net. Appropriating some of the language of the left about revolution and the promise of the future, he unleashed what he liked to call the magic of the marketplace: cutting taxes for the rich, eliminating regulations, and whittling away at social spending.What Reagan created, with his embrace of the nutty Laffer curve and his smiling war on organized labor, was a strange, unequally distributed boom that lasted through the early 1990s. After the caretaker George H. W. Bush administration evaporated, Bill Clinton took over and, with a few minor adjustments, kept the party going for another decade. Profits skyrocketed, as did the financial markets.But there was a contradiction under it all: a system dependent on high levels of mass consumption for both economic dynamism and political legitimacy has a problem when mass purchasing power is squeezed. For a few decades, consumers borrowed to make up for what their paychecks were lacking. But that model broke down once and for all with the crisis of 2008. Today we desperately need a new political economy   one that features a more equal distribution of income, investment in our rotting social and physical infrastructure, and a more humane ethic. We also need a judicious foreign policy, and a commander-in-chief who will resist the instant gratification of air strikes and rhetorical bluster.Is Hillary Clinton the answer to these prayers? It s hard to think so, despite the widespread liberal fantasy of her as a progressive paragon, who will follow through exactly as Barack Obama did not. In fact, a close look at her life and career is perhaps the best antidote to all these great expectations.But the intimidating image glaring out from the front of  My Turn  was created long before Henwood penned the book, which he says was developed out of the Harper s piece and goes into greater detail about  her long history in shaping the  New Democrat agenda,      an agenda which  she now purports to be running against,  Henwood told MSNBC.And then there s Sole, a diehard Clinton supporter and also a fan of Henwood s, according to International Business Times.Sole debuted the painting, along with other similarly themed pieces, last year. Later, the pieces were published in Politico magazine under the headline  Extremely Ready for Hillary,  according to the International Business Times. I love Hillary Clinton, I support Hillary Clinton, I very much want her to be president. I will certainly vote for her,  Sole told International Business Times. What I don t get is the reaction that calls the cover sexist,  Henwood told MSNBC.  Hillary is tough and determined, characteristics that shouldn t be seen as off-limits to women. The political question is what she or anyone else does with toughness and determination, and that s what my criticism of her focuses on. I have no problem with ball-busting women,  Henwood continued.  I kinda like them, in fact. I just don t like [Hillary Clinton s] politics.  Via: MSNBC