Insider Status

Nick Gillespie must have forgotten to vote

I don't always agree with everything a candidate says or does after Blue America helps get them elected. I've had disagreements and even arguments with Donna Edwards, Alan Grayson, Matt Cartwright, Ted Lieu, Beto O'Rourke... to name a few. But so what? These are people I like and respect and no one agrees with anyone on everything all the time. These are still people I like to speak with and to exchange ideas with. Other relationships have been with candidates who are... less resilient. Some are downright brittle-- so much so that a polite criticism leads to a "fuck you, asshole; lose my number." Gee, I'm glad I helped you raise thousands of dollars when no one else would even take your call. Some don't even wait for an argument. There have been two or three candidates we've helped, who, after election day, never even called to say thanks and then never returned a call or an e-mail, even people I had spoken with regularly during their campaign. What an odd thing! Maybe they just feel guilty for having lied about how progressive they would be as they quickly pivoted to being a conservative... or started looking for lobbyists to line their pockets. That's rare but not that rare. Or maybe it was something else.

In a short interesting piece in In These Times last week by Barbara Ransby, comparing Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Rashida Tlaib with Shirley Chisholm and Ella Baker, Ransby wrote that "[w]hen outsiders are allowed into the inner sanctums of power, the first condition is that they assimilate. Shirley Chisholm, a tough-talking former school teacher from Brooklyn with Caribbean roots who became the first black woman elected to Congress in 1968, recalled how her colleagues, believing she didn’t 'understand politics,' tried to 'educate' her about Washington’s horse-trading ways... Insider status is a privilege. New members of the club are expected to play by the rules. As James Baldwin observed, that is 'the price of the ticket.' The second condition for outsiders is that, once admitted, they distance themselves from the movements that got them elected. 'When I first came to Washington, I would sometimes confide to other members how I wanted to help the people of my community,' Chisholm writes in her memoir, Unbought and Unbossed. 'It became embarrassing. I was talking a foreign language to some of my colleagues when I said community and people.'"

What scares the establishment is not that a single Black or Latinx or Arab-American or indigenous woman is allowed “inside” the corridors of power, but that she gives voice to the communities that elected her. During Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, critics were outraged by a 2001 speech in which she suggested an experienced Latina elder might in some cases possess better judgment than a privileged white male “who hasn’t lived that life.” That is what the establishment fears: not that newcomers look different, but that they bring with them a set of values, ideas and sensibilities validated in oppressed communities. The “price of the ticket” for inclusion often means conformity.

“I did not come to Congress to behave myself and stay away from explosive issues so I can keep coming back,” Chisholm wrote. She served in Congress on her own terms and in 1972 made a bid for the presidency, an audacious move by a black woman at the time. She did so against the advice of supposedly admiring insiders. And when the radical Black Panther Party endorsed her, she accepted their support, refusing to conform to liberal expectations that she distance herself from the more militant wing of the Black Power movement.

...Like Chisholm and Baker before them, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib are not dazzled simply to be in the club nor intimidated by the threats of marginalization lobbed at them. When Tlaib called for Trump’s impeachment, she used gritty language from the street, not the parlance of the elite. In response, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted to Tlaib that “I got your back” and the “GOP lost entitlement to policing women’s behavior a long time ago. Next.”

Ocasio-Cortez insists on advancing a Green New Deal, and Tlaib is pushing for a delegation to Palestine. When Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) admonished Tlaib to instead “listen and learn,” Tlaib evoked her Palestinian family in a tweet: “I hope you’ll come with me on the trip to listen and learn. My sity (grandmother) will welcome you with an embrace & love.”

Reason magazine is a small libertarian publication over which Nick Gillespie ruled until 2017. He still writes from the publication as an editor-at-large. Yesterday, after he watched Trump's deranged rant at CPAC, he wrote a silly piece for the magazine, Trump Just Might Have Won the 2020 Election Today. You can see why the magazine must have been relieved to have gotten rid of him from their top slot. "If Donald Trump is able to deliver the sort of performance he gave today at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual meeting of right-wingers held near Washington, D.C.," he wrote, "his reelection is a foregone conclusion. There is simply no potential candidate in the Democratic Party who wouldn't be absolutely blown off the stage by him."

At the same time Trump was giving a juvenile speech only a moron could like and that indicated he was high on Adderall and should be carted off to an insane asylum, Bernie was speaking to thousands of people in Brooklyn, addressing the problems and solutions Americans would like to discuss. Trump was name-calling and acting like a clown. Bernie was speaking like a president. Yet Gillespie saw something very different in Trump's idiotic address than what I saw claiming "he was not simply good, he was Prince-at-the-Super-Bowl great, deftly flinging juvenile taunts at everyone who has ever crossed him, tossing red meat to the Republican faithful, and going sotto voce"-- don't speak Latin? that always means he's about to unleash a series of absurd lies-- "serious to talk about justice being done for working-class Americans screwed over by global corporations."

Gillespie seems to think a majority of voters are eager for more of Trump's bullshit and more of his greatest hits-- "Crooked Hillary," "build the wall," "America is winning again"... They don't. "At times," he wrote, "it was like listening to Robin Williams' genie in the Disney movie Aladdin, Howard Stern in his peak years as a radio shock jock, or Don Rickles as an insult comic. When he started making asides, Trump observed, 'This is how I got elected, by going off script.' Two years into his presidency and he's just getting warmed up." Not this time. The CPAC crowd will be with him and plenty of 2-digit IQ dullards on drugs-- and Gillespie-- but normal Americans are sick of this shtik and can't wait to see Trump and his family marched off to prison. This isn't going to elect anyone:

First and foremost, Trump was frequently funny and outre in the casually mean way that New Yorkers exude like nobody else in America. "You put the wrong people in a couple of positions," he said, lamenting the appointment of Robert Mueller as a special prosecutor, "and all of a sudden they're trying to take you out with bullshit." He voiced Jeff Sessions in a mock-Southern accent, recusing "muhself" and asked the adoring crowd why the former attorney generally hadn't told him he was going to do that before he was appointed.

Democrats backing the Green New Deal (GND) "are talking about trains to Hawaii," he said. "They haven't figured out how to get to Europe yet." He begged the Democrats not to abandon the GND because he recognizes that the more its details and costs are discussed, the more absurd it will become. "When the wind stops blowing, that's the end of your energy," he said at one point. "Did the wind stop blowing, I'd like to watch television today, guys?" "We'll go back to boats," he said, drawing huge laughs when he added, "I don't want to talk [the Democrats] out of [the GND], I just want to be the Republican who runs against it."

He railed against Never-Trump Republicans: "They're on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation," he said, adding "they're basically dishonest people" that no one cares about. He joked about being in the White House all alone on New Year's because of the government shutdown. "I was in the White House and I was lonely, so I went to Iraq," he said, recounting that when his plane was approaching the U.S. airstrip in Iraq, all lights had to be extinguished for landing. "We spend trillions of dollars in the Middle East and we can't land planes [in Iraq] with the lights on," he said, shaking his head in disbelief. "We gotta get out." He then riffed on the generals he met there who, contrary to the Pentagon brass he dealt with, said they could vanquish ISIS in a week. He claimed to have talked with a general named "Raising Cane," which might be Brigadier Gen. J. Daniel Caine, but Trump is the farthest thing from a details guy, right? "Sometimes I learn more from soldiers than I do generals," he said, deftly moving from jokes to more-substantive discussions of policies or issues.

...All in all, it was, in the words of Daniel Dale, the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, "one of the least-hinged speeches Trump has given in a long time." It was indeed all over the place but like the weirdly wide-ranging and digressive speech in which he declared a national emergency, it was also an absolute tour de force, laying out every major point of disagreement between Republicans and Democrats (abortion, the Second Amendment, and taxes, among other things) while tagging the latter aggressively as socialists who will not only end the private provision of health care but take over the energy sector too. Those charges take on new life in the wake of the announcement of the GND and comments, however short-lived, by Democrats such as Kamala Harris, who at one point recently called for an end to private health care. And over 100 House Democrats have signed on to a plan that would end private health insurance in two years. For all the biting criticism and dark humor in today's speech, Trump has mostly ditched the "American Carnage" rhetoric that marked his first Inaugural Address, pushing onto liberals and Democrats all the negativity and anger that used to surround him like the dust cloud surrounds Pigpen in the old Peanuts cartoons. "We have people in Congress right now who hate our country," he said. "We can name every one of them. Sad, very, very sad."

At moments, he seemed to be workshopping his themes and slogans for 2020. "We believe in the American Dream, not the socialist nightmare," he averred at one point. "Now you have a president who finally standing up for America." The future, he said "does not belong to those who believe in socialism. The future belongs to those who believe in freedom. I've said it before and will say it again: America will never be a socialist country." That's a line that may not work forever, but it will almost certainly get the job done in 2020.

None of this is to suggest that this speech wasn't as fact-challenged as almost every utterance Trump has given since announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination (go to Daniel Dale's Twitter thread for a running count of misstatements of fact). He hammered trade deficits in a way that will remind anyone with an undergrad economics course under their belt that he fundamentally doesn't know what he's talking about. He misrepresented both NAFTA and the new trade bill he crafted with Mexico and Canada, and at the exact moment that hundreds of wearied listeners started leaving the ballroom at The Gaylord Resort and Convention Center, he claimed that not a single person had left their seat.

But the 2020 presidential race is not going to be decided based on which candidate is more tightly moored to reality. It's going to be decided, like these things always are, by the relative health of the economy and the large vision of the future the different candidates put forward. As the economy continues to expand (however anemically compared to historical averages) and he continues to avoid credible charges of impeachable offenses, Trump is becoming sunnier and sunnier while the Democrats are painting contemporary America as a late-capitalist hellhole riven by growing racial, ethnic, and other tensions.

Trump isn't the creator of post-factual politics in America, he is merely currently its most-gifted practitioner (oddly, his ideological and demographic counterpart and fellow New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may become a challenger to him on precisely this score). Trump may have next to no credibility in profoundly disturbing ways, but American politics has been drifting away from reality for the entire 21st century, when the 2000 election was essentially decided by a coin flip, the United States entered the Iraq War under false premises, and Barack Obama took home Politifact's 2013 "Lie of the Year" award and dissembled unconvincingly in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations.

That Trump didn't invent the current situation doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about it, but if he can continue to perform the way he did today at CPAC, it remains to be seen what Democratic rival can rise to that challenge.

He referred to Mazie Hirono, who is being treated for cancer, as a "crazy female senator." No doubt he'll say something like that in every speech he gives between now and November 2020. And no doubt Nick Gillespie got a genuine kick out of it. But Trump is loathed by women, by people of color, by educated people, by the LGBTQ community, by political independents, and, increasingly, by folks at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, who finally realize he lied to them. Let Gillespie take another hit of that libertarian bong he's clutching and imagine Trump's going to win all he wants. But maybe he'll be saved by his brilliant and attractive legion of supporters, like the lovely economist and social historian Roseanne Barr:

DCCC Has A Litmus Test For Its Candidates-- They Don't Want Medicare-For-All Backers

When I was a kid my father owned a small clothing store in Bed-Stuy, which was part of the Assembly district Shirley Chisholm represented. I used to work there frequently. Soon after I wen t off to college Chisholm was elected Brooklyn's first-ever African-America congressmember (as well as the first black woman ever elected to Congress in the U.S.)... talk about a pioneer and a game-changer. When she was first elected, the white men who ran Congress decided to demean her by appointing her to the Agriculture Committee. We're they in for a shock when she worked with farm state Republicans to turn the country's surplus food into a robust food stamp program that fed poor people and helped create the WIC program-- Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. There's one quote of hers that always inspired me and that I never forgot: "If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair." She'll always be one of my heroes. One day-- soon I hope-- we'll have a woman president. Shirley was the first woman to run for a major party nomination, something that I hope leads soon to President Warren.

The establishment and their shills-- some consciously so, others just instinctively-- are in an uproar about "litmus tests" and "purity." And, indeed, Pelosi's DCCC seem to have created a litmus test of it's own-- they are favoring Blue Dogs, "ex"-Republicans, wealthy self-funders and anti-Choice candidates over actual Democrats. Rahm made the DCCC a vehicle for this kind of garbage in 2005 but it's now become systematized under Steve Israel and Ben Ray Lujan. As we mentioned earlier, they also seem to be making health care a litmus test-- candidates campaigning for Medicare-For-All, which is backed my the majority of Democrats in Congress-- are being shoved aside in favor of candidates who refuse to say where they stand on the issue. Yesterday a centrist establishment economist who's been an anti-Sanders propagandist for some time now, wrote in the NY Times that "single-payer, while it has many virtues, isn’t the only way to get [to universal health coverage]; it would be much harder politically than its advocates acknowledge; and there are more important priorities." He wrote that "some progressives-- by and large people who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries-- are already trying to revive one of his signature proposals: expanding Medicare to cover everyone. Some even want to make support for single-payer a litmus test for Democratic candidates. So it’s time for a little pushback." I gave up reading this clown over a year ago and normally avoid him like the plague, but his stats from the Commonwealth Fund are interesting. It "compares health care performance among advanced nations. America is at the bottom; the top three performers are Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands. And the thing is, these three leaders have very different systems. Britain has true socialized medicine: The government provides health care directly through the National Health Service. Australia has a single-payer system, basically Medicare for All-- it’s even called Medicare. But the Dutch have what we might call Obamacare done right: individuals are required to buy coverage from regulated private insurers, with subsidies to help them afford the premiums." Of course, he favors the least progressive of the three approaches and claims the Dutch system is the way to go-- "incremental improvements in the A.C.A., rather than radical change. Further evidence for this view is how relatively well Obamacare, imperfect as it is, already works in states that try to make it work-- did you know that only 5.4 percent of New Yorkers are now uninsured?" And he claims "the political logic that led to Obamacare rather than Medicare for all still applies."

It’s not just about paying off the insurance industry, although getting insurers to buy in to health reform wasn’t foolish, and arguably helped save the A.C.A.: At a crucial moment America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry lobbying organization, and Blue Cross Blue Shield intervened to denounce Republican plans.

A far more important consideration is minimizing disruption to the 156 million people who currently get insurance through their employers, and are largely satisfied with their coverage. Moving to single-payer would mean taking away this coverage and imposing new taxes; to make it fly politically you’d have to convince most of these people both that they would save more in premiums than they pay in additional taxes, and that their new coverage would be just as good as the old.

This might in fact be true, but it would be one heck of a hard sell. Is this really where progressives want to spend their political capital?

What would I do instead? I’d enhance the A.C.A., not replace it, although I would strongly support reintroducing some form of public option-- a way for people to buy into public insurance-- that could eventually lead to single-payer.

Meanwhile, progressives should move beyond health care and focus on other holes in the U.S. safety net.

He says he has nothing against single-payer... he just hates progressives and everything they stand for and... Hillary Forever. Matt Bruening at BuzzFeed, who writes that Democrats need to recognize that the Affordable Care Act is too flawed to save and that single payer is the only path forward, had a more sensible perspective-- one more in touch with reality-- than Krugman's stubborn centrism.

In the course of defending Obamacare, centrist pundits and institutions made a moral argument about the brutality of health uninsurance that also renders our current system totally indefensible. The Center for American Progress released a report showing that the Republican bill would cause around 200,000 more people to die over the next decade due to lack of health insurance, while Vox’s Ezra Klein described the CBO’s report detailing the collapse of health insurance coverage as “one of the most singularly devastating documents I’ve seen in American politics.”

If the 200,000 more deaths caused by switching from Obamacare to the defunct Republican plan is an unspeakable moral atrocity, then how do we justify sticking with Obamacare-- which still leaves millions uninsured-- rather than moving to a universal single-payer system? The math that produced CAP’s estimates, based on a study that concluded 1 person dies unnecessarily for every 830 people who lack health insurance, would imply that 300,000 additional deaths will be caused by Obamacare relative to a universal system where everyone is covered.

There is simply no longer a coherent centrist case for carrying on with Obamacare.

The Affordable Care Act did a lot of good, but the system it has left us with is still a disaster. According to Gallup, around 11.3% of adults currently lack health insurance. Despite the existence of Medicaid, uninsurance remains especially prevalent among those living in poverty. A Treasury study based on 2014 tax data concluded that the uninsurance rate for poor families was 10 times higher than it is for high-income families.

The problem is even worse than those numbers suggest. Tallies of people lacking health insurance are done at a particular point in time, meaning that they obscure just how often people move in and out of health insurance. Over half of the non-elderly population receive employer-sponsored insurance and, in a given year, over 40% of workers separate from their jobs. Not every separation results in an uninsurance spell, but many do.

Even if they manage to keep insurance when between jobs, workers and their families face the miserable hassle of draining their savings to preserve coverage through COBRA, signing up for health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges, or having to switch to an entirely different plan at their new job.

Even those who remain consistently insured face yet another coverage problem: high out-of-pocket expenses. According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent economic well-being report, 23% of Americans with health insurance forgo medical treatment every year because of an inability to pay.

A single-payer system is the most obvious way forward to finally achieve what all of our developed country peers did many decades ago: an easy-to-use, cost-effective health insurance system that covers everyone.

In many ways, the Obamacare experience provides the best argument for the universal alternative. Obamacare primarily increased health insurance coverage through two mechanisms: expanding Medicaid eligibility up the income ladder and creating an elaborate, subsidized individual marketplace. The Medicaid expansion, which closely approximates what a single-payer system would look like, was a smashing success. The individual marketplace, however, has been awful, with premiums increasing dramatically and insurance choices dwindling to two, one, or even zero options in some places.

Crucially, the superior performance of Medicaid was noted not just by wonks but also by ordinary people. Report after report after report has documented the existence of Medicaid envy: people bitter that they had been forced onto the individual marketplace because their income is too high for Medicaid. Contrary to the beliefs of Obamacare’s architects, it appears that people would much rather be on public health insurance, even on a stigmatized program for those on low incomes, than deal with private insurers.

The individual preference for public insurance is reflected in public polling as well. According to Gallup, 58% of Americans favor replacing the current system with a “federally funded healthcare program providing insurance for all Americans.” Among Democrats, support soars to 73%.

The Democratic party has generally ignored its voters on this issue, but that is starting to change. Around 60% of House Democrats are now cosponsors of John Conyers’ single-payer bill, the highest number recorded in the 12 years since it was first introduced. Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, both of whom are rumored as likely 2020 presidential candidates, have recently announced their support for a single-payer system as well. The current frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders, has long made single-payer one of his signature issues.

Now that the Republicans have failed, the time is ripe for a serious single-payer push. Policy institutions need to work hard to hammer out the details of a single-payer plan, and the Democratic party needs to stop fumbling around incompetently for a positive vision and instead unify behind the one already supported by the overwhelming majority of its voters.

I asked one of our most fearless congressional candidates, David Gill, if he would be interested in commenting on this post. He got back to me and said "Do I want to add a quote on this post? You bet I do!! This is IL-13 in a nutshell!"

I have been a dues-paying member of Physicians for a National Health Program for 25 years, a group of 20,000 doctors who have been advocating for Single-Payer healthcare for all these years. As a family physician and as an Emergency Department physician, I'm well aware of the many shortcomings of healthcare and healthcare financing, both pre- and post-ACA.

I ran for Congress in 2012 and defeated the centrist establishment-backed Democrat in the primary that year. I lost in the general by 0.3%, thanks to the presence of a liberal independent on the ballot that year who split the vote just barely enough to keep me out of Washington. Subsequent Democrats (moderates) have lost here by 50 to 60 times what I lost by, further evidence of the strength of my message. I'm running again, because the time is ripe to finally bring single-payer to fruition, and I look forward to helping lead the charge, speaking with a voice of authority, based on my nearly 30 years of patient care. But is the DCCC behind me? No, of course not. Instead, they've recruited a former fundraiser of Senator Dick Durbin, a woman who speaks in broad generalities about health care, offering such platitudes as "I want to fix what needs to be fixed with Obamacare, not throw it out."

With the help of Blue America, I'm looking forward to beating the DCCC again in our primary next March, and then finishing the job in November 2018. We've waited way too long for the system which will be great for our health and for our economy: single-payer. We are nearing the end of the era dominated by the for-profit health insurance industry.

David defines "courageous" among candidates we've worked with. Please consider helping him win his battle to end conservative domination of his sprawling central Illinois district that goes from Bloomington and Champaign in the north, through Decatur and Springfield to the outer suburbs east of St. Louis, by tapping on the thermometer on the right.

Shirley Chisholm May Have Paved The Way For Him, But Barack Obama Will Never Live Up To Her Vision-- Or Even Try

On January 25, 1972 I was living in Afghanistan and it was months later that I heard that a Member of Congress from my hometown had declared for the presidency. It was just the kind of idealistic, inspiring race that always attracts me. Shirley Chisholm was the first African-American woman ever elected to Congress. Before leaving the U.S. I had worked in her Brooklyn district at my father's clothing store and I thought of her as my Representative, rather than my own conservative Democratic carbuncle, Emanuel Celler (the most senior and powerful Democrat in the House, defeated that year in a primary because of his opposition to equal rights for women). Chisholm, the daughter of West Indian immigrants, had been elected to Congress in 1968 and on that January day at the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, she became the first woman to run for president as a Democrat and the first African-American to run on either major party. She survived three attempted assassinations during the campaign. Maybe this is why:

I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America.

I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud.”

I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that.”

I am not the candidate of any political bosses or fat cats or special interests.”

I stand here now without endorsements from many big name politicians or celebrities or any other kind of prop. I do not intend to offer to you the tired and glib clichés, which for too long have been an accepted part of our political life. I am the candidate of the people of America. And my presence before you now symbolizes a new era in American political history.

...Americans all over are demanding a new sensibility, a new philosophy of government from Washington. Instead of sending spies to snoop on participants on Earth Day, I would welcome the efforts of concerned citizens of all ages to stop the abuse of our environment. Instead of watching a football game on television, while young people beg for the attention of their President, concerning our actions abroad, I would encourage them to speak out, organize for peaceful change, and vote in November. Instead of blocking efforts to control huge amounts of money given political candidates by the rich and the powerful, I would provide certain limits on such amounts and encourage all people of this nation to contribute small sums to the candidates of their choice. Instead of calculating political cost of this or that policy, and of weighing in favors of this or that group, depending on whether that group voted for me in 1968, I would remind all Americans at this hour of the words of Abraham Lincoln, ‘A house divided, cannot stand.

“We Americans are all fellow countrymen. One day confronting the judgment of history in our country. We are all God’s children and a bit of each of us is as precious as the will of the most powerful general or corporate millionaire. Our will can create a new America in 1972, one where there is freedom from violence and war, at home and abroad, where there is freedom from poverty and discrimination, where there exists at least a feeling, that we are making progress and assuring for everyone medical care, employment, and decent housing. Where we more decisively clean up our streets, our water, and our air. Where we work together, black and white, to rebuild our neighborhoods and to make our cities quiet, attractive, and efficient and fundamentally where we live in the confidence that every man and every woman in America has at long last the opportunity to become all that he was created of being, such as his ability.

She never had a chance. So why did she bother? No one who knew her needed to ask but she answered that herself, for those who didn't: "...Whether or not the black people are politically sophisticated enough to be aware of the fact that my candidacy is not to be regarded as a candidacy where I can win the presidency at this moment, but a candidacy that is paving the way for people of other ethnic groups, including blacks, to run and perhaps win the office."

She inspired a young Barbara Lee, who ran for Congress herself a quarter century later and was the only Member of that august body to have voted against Bush's authorization of the use of force against Afghanistan-- and has continuously inspired progressives across the country with her integrity and dedication to represent working families instead of the ruling elite. Barbara Lee has as much of a chance to be elected president as Shirley Chisholm did. Instead Chisholm's prediction that she was paving the way for a minority president was made true three years ago when the American public, by a large margin, elected Barack Obama. Yesterday Obama announced the beginning of his reelection campaign. If Shirley Chisholm was alive today, she could dust off the old speech, update it and run against him saying many of the same things she said about Richard Nixon.