Courtesy of newyorker.com, November 21, 2016

Making America White Again, by Toni Morrison

This is a serious project. All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.

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For all the chaos and unpredictability and the sometimes appalling spectacle of this election season, the question of which candidate actually deserves to be president has never been a difficult one.

Vogue has no history of political endorsements. Editors in chief have made their opinions known from time to time, but the magazine has never spoken in an election with a single voice. Given the profound stakes of this one, and the history that stands to be made, we feel that should change.

Vogue endorses Hillary Clinton for president of the United States.

Perhaps that sentence won’t come as a surprise. Vogue has enthusiastically covered Hillary Clinton’s career, her rise from Yale law student to governor’s wife to First Lady to senator to Secretary of State. She has been profiled by the magazine six times.

(For the record, we have also featured Donald Trump—or, more particularly, his family members Ivana, Marla, Melania, and Ivanka—multiple times in our pages.)

We understand that Clinton has not always been a perfect candidate, yet her fierce intelligence and considerable experience are reflected in policies and positions that are clear, sound, and hopeful.

She supports comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship. She speaks up for racial justice, for reforming policing and sentencing laws. Her years as Secretary of State have shown that she understands how to strengthen alliances abroad, respond to global crises, and continue American leadership in the world. She is forceful in her support for LGBTQ rights, including an end to discrimination against transgender people. She knows the challenges working women face. Her tax proposals and commitment to infrastructure investment will be a boon to the middle class. She will continue the important work on health-care reform begun by President Obama. She is a sane voice on guns.

Can Clinton unify a deeply divided America? Heal the wounds of this unbearably fraught political season? Our divisions are real, and it will take more than one intensely qualified leader to heal them.

And yet two words give us hope: Madam President. Women won the vote in 1920. It has taken nearly a century to bring us to the brink of a woman leading our country for the first time. Let’s put this election behind us and become the America we want to be: optimistic, forward-looking, and modern.

Let’s head to the polls on Tuesday, November 8, and vote.

Courtesy of Kevin Drum, MotherJones.com, September 19, 2016

For a lot of liberals, the most important goal of this election is to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. And since Trump naturally sucks up most of the political oxygen, that means lots of blogging about Trump and not so much about Clinton.

But a lot of lefties aren’t happy about that. They want a positive argument in favor of voting for Clinton, not just a negative one for voting against Trump. That’s fair enough, so I figured I’d put one together.

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