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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

I could see Clinton doing that backflip but if it's Trump he seems to be genuinely anti-free trade.

trump isn't genuinely anything but pro-trump.

Hillary reads the same to me, I must say. I have no idea what she genuinely believes.

But, honestly, why would anyone run for president unless they were an insane egoist or craved power? It's not a job a sane person would volunteer to do.

There are a few rare individuals that do it out of desire to do good, but they seem rarer by the day.

I wish Elizabeth Warren had run. She is a prime example of a sane down to earth person turning down the position everyone else lusts after.

She's so sane and down to earth that she'd rather be the most powerful Senator for 20 years than President for 4 years. You should be thanking her for playing the long game.

I'm over her when she decided to endorse Hillary thereby implicitly endorsing Hillary's Wall Street connections.

So much for defending against big banks. :(

Human affairs are a marathon, not a sprint. Pace yourself.

Also, I've learned to embrace incrementalism and transactional politics (quid pro quo).

Lastly, if you bring the heat, the targeted policy maker(s) will see the light. The color of their logo won't be a factor. Sanders' campaign, and massive following, absolutely moved Clinton to the left.

It moved her statements to the left (for now). I very much doubt that she's going to actually go through with things given her past history.

Examples: TPP, gay marriage etc. One could try arguing that she has evolved but MANY see her as just flip-flopping to what seems politically expedient at that time. Hence the tremendous amount of distrust.

Embrace incrementalism = let's make mediocre great again. Imagine that kind of mentality when it was announced that we were going to try to send someone to the Moon.

"Let's shoot for the moon!"

"Enh, let's just name an airport instead to build support"

How do you think gay marriage and marijuana were legalized (thus far)? Fits and starts. Fighting for every single inch. And then eventually victory. Think of any major, significant social progress. Emancipation, suffrage, welfare, worker safety, child labor, etc. etc. Each decades in the making.

I encourage you to read The Waxman Report by former US Sen Henry Waxman to get a sense of how much effort and time it takes to forge policy, move the needle.

Continue to disempower yourself thru cynicism, apathy, and inaction.

Or follow the examples of Sanders, Warren and 1000s of others and learn to convert your outrage into action.

There is nothing preventing any former President for running for another elected office that is not in the line of succession.

I think Andrew Johnson ran for the Senate while still POTUS if memory serves.

Being President doesn't tend to do wonders for public opinion, though - it's an incredibly public role and every decision is scrutinized to a degree higher than any other public office.

If you want a principled presidential candidate on the left of the political spectrum, you could vote for Jill Stein (or hope that Clinton gets indicted by the FBI before the democratic convention so that Sanders can step in, but the chances of that are slim to none).

Jill Stein has similar policy positions to Bernie Sanders, if the Sanders supporters realise this en masse she may have decent chance.

Pretty sure Hillary's views are well aligned with a typical leftist agenda. I don't see her passing pro gun or anti abortion laws for example.

The Clintons are always associated with DLC (Democratic Leadership Council?), a centrist organization. Remember Bill Clinton is for all intents and purposes a Southern Democrat, so he is a close to a blue dog democratic president. Hillary Clinton luckily chose to be Senator of NY (which is a cold political move, esp. when you account for political polarization), she has moved to the Left when tides are that way. Hillary was a staunch centrist during Bush presidency including being very corporate friendly (and still is). Other than abortion rights, Hillary was all over in many issues, including crime, welfare, immigration etc. Her cold ambition fizzled in front of an aspirational candidacy of Obama and now, the D party moved to Left and Bernie pulled it to more Left, so she will play along with it. Hillary Clinton is architect of TPP in its current form, at it is politically expedient for her to deny it. The Clintons were always centrist, that is why Chelsea Clinton was on the board of IAC (pretty sure, its the last name, not her talents). The whole definition of Centrism esp. in a very ideological Political world, many times looks like Opportunism, and many Centrist leaders through out the world, ascend not with Philosophical fidelity but with carefully building a Personality following.

> Other than abortion rights, Hillary was all over in many issues, including crime, welfare, immigration etc

The same statement is true about the Democratic party as a whole. They've been all over the place on those issues over the last two decades.

Clinton may not be as liberal as you seem to want, but she pretty clearly has had a liberal track record compared to her fellow party members: https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/hillary-clinton-was-libe...

I guess that means, Clinton = TPP comes into full force, regardless of what she says now. Would you agree ?

The president doesn't have legislative authority, and cannot pass either pro-gun or anti-abortion laws.

All they can do is, like Obama did with Obamacare, run what is essentially an advertising/pressure campaign to get something passed.

They can pass it by signing it.

I suppose we can only hope to survive until government by A.I. happens.

Preferably open-sourced.

This, he's basically in the game of reactionary politics. Candidate A has X position, so he must take the Y position. Any 'policy' he has in the election process is nothing more than a popularity drive.

I'm assuming you know him well personally, otherwise how could you make such a statement earnestly.

Seemed it was an opinion. Trump, a well known and documented public figure, has certainly had a much of his life documented in media as an entertainer, author and business executive.I think there is enough evidence to make a claim (either way) about public figures & their temperment without knowing them personally.

Based on what he says and how he acts?

pro-pro-pro-pro-pro-pro-pro-pro... Stack Overflow Exception

Didn't she call it the "gold standard"? She wouldn't need to backflip, just stop telling the lies she's been telling during the elections.

TPP is not free trade

lol you actually believe a Republican would be against free trade?

There's a reason he ran as a Republican in the first place.

Trump wants corporations to stay in the US. TPP allows corporations to sue the US for loss of profits in other countries IIRC, so that would mean TPP is indeed against Trump's interests.

He did that because he had to pick a party. He could have just as easily run as a Democrat and used the same tactics with different talking points.

He doesn't really alight with either party.

But he's most certainly anti-free-trade. All of his business and money is in the US (mostly in real estate). It's in his best interest to artificially prop up US industry by shutting down inbound trade.

He became a Republican because he is a corporatist.

It is Republican orthodoxy to be against consumer and labor rights.

He has absolutely no interest in abandoning the TPP, since, as a Republican, he is in favor of exporting US jobs.

When dealing with Trump, it it important to ignore what he says, because he will literally lie 71 times in a single speech: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-fact-check_...

Trump may be a liar, but it's probably a miscalculation to think he has greater loyalty to the Republican Party than to himself.

Trump is a real estate guy. His business is intrinsically tied to the US. He can't outsource hotel construction jobs to China. That makes being anti-globalization an easy path for him.

Moreover, more capital sloshing around in the US instead of going overseas means lower interest rates for construction loans.

His businesses are overseas now.

> When dealing with Trump, it it important to ignore what he says, because he will literally lie 71 times in a single speech: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-fact-check_....

First of all, HuffPo is uh, far from an unbiased source when it comes to Trump. But secondly, a lot of that stuff has very flimsy reasoning behind it:

> 11. Claim: “She wasn’t dragged to the ground.” — Trump on Fields.

> Reality: Trump implies here that Fields said she was dragged to the ground. She never did.

> She said, “I almost fell to the ground, but was able to maintain my balance,” which is what the video shows.

If you follow the link with her quote, right before the "I almost fell..." sentence, in her own words she says "Someone had grabbed me tightly by the arm and yanked me down."

Which directly contradicts

> Reality: Trump implies here that Fields said she was dragged to the ground. She never did.

So uh, HuffPo is lying here about a time they claimed Trump is lying?

And then you get stuff like this:

> 53. Claim: “I am not soliciting money from insurance companies and from lumber companies and from banks and from — if I did, I would have made Jeb Bush look like a baby.”

> Reality: He made Bush look like a baby anyway.

Are we reaching here or what? They're seriously trying to say he's lying about not making Jeb look bad? And then you've got stuff like this:

> 40. Claim: “Only a fool would give a tax return [during an audit].”

> Realty: Lawyers do advise against doing this. But nothing about being audited prevents Trump from releasing his tax records.

So yeah, he's right that he shouldn't give out his tax return during an audit. What is he lying about here? He never said he couldn't, just that he shouldn't.

If the disclaimer the HuffPo puts on every Trump article hasn't clued you in, they've clearly got an axe to grind against him and you're not exactly guaranteed to get unbiased reporting about him from them.

Keep going. You have about 68 more to disqualify in order to prove that Trump isn't a liar.

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