What Michael Moore Understands About Hillary Clinton

By Richard Brody, The New Yorker

20 October 16

ichael Moore in TrumpLand” isn’t quite the film that I expected it to be, and that’s all to the good. Moore is, of course, a genius of political satire, deploying his persona—as a populist socialist skeptic with a superb sense of humor and a chess player’s skill at media positioning—to deeply humane ends that are mainly detached from practicality, policy, and practical politics. The very idea of the new film—a recording of Moore’s one-man show from the stage of a theatre in a small, predominantly Republican town in Ohio—runs the risk of self-parody, being a feature-length lampooning of Trump, laid out with meticulously researched facts set forth with the sublime derision of which Moore is a master. It would have been a highly saleable version of preaching to the converted.

Instead, Moore—a well-known and outspoken supporter of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary campaign—has done something different, better, and even majestic. He has made a film that, at its frequent best, raises his own celebrity to a political object and transforms that celebrity into a mode of combative yet deeply empathetic practical politics, even turns it into a political weapon of the sort that’s seemingly ready-made to combat Trump, whose candidacy, after all, is itself purely a product of the celebrity industry.

Moore’s film—gestating for a year, made in twelve days, filmed on October 7th (four hours, Moore said in a Q. & A., after the Trump/Billy Bush tape broke), and completed on Tuesday morning, just hours before its première, at IFC Center—is centered on the Murphy Theatre, in Wilmington, Ohio, a site that, Moore notes in the film, is doubly ironic. First, Wilmington is the county seat of Clinton County; second, the theatre’s renovation had the financial backing of Glenn Beck. There, Moore brought together an audience of diverse political persuasions—Trump supporters, Clinton supporters, third-party supporters, and even nonvoters—and, in his way, sought, at different points in his highly performative talk, to address them all.

Moving between a podium, a desk, and an armchair on a stage decorated with mural-sized black-and-white photographs of Hillary Clinton in her younger days, Moore acknowledges the political diversity of the audience (not much ethnic diversity—almost everyone is white) and then yields to some easy political theatre—explaining that, to put Trump supporters at ease, the Mexicans in the audience are seated separately, in the balcony (and then placed behind a cardboard wall), as are the Muslims in attendance (who are kept under video surveillance by a drone flying above them). He jokes about Trump supporters by joking about liberals, mocking himself and his fellow-progressives as uncertain and deferential and praising conservatives for at least being “decisive, organized, and disciplined”—they get up at five in the morning, he says, while “we” only see 5 A.M. after a night of partying.

Then he gets to the heart of the matter, which has two parts. The first is to address Trump supporters from his own heart. He begins with a series of jokes addressing and warmly mocking “vagenda of manocide”-type masculine paranoia, culminating in jokes about the internment camps for men that would arise during a Clinton Presidency. But he then turns earnest and reads a text that, he says, he wrote that very day (and it’s actually handwritten)—one in which he addresses Trump supporters, “the dispossessed,” who are members of the “former middle class,” people who’ve lost jobs and health insurance, who may have lost their homes and their savings, and who, he says, have “lost everything but the right to vote.” Moore describes Trump as “the Molotov cocktail, the hand grenade thrown into the system that screwed them.” Moore acknowledges that many of Trump’s supporters are all the more motivated by the hatred that Trump arouses among the nation’s élites—the overlords of the institutions that have presided over these voters’ misery. He calls the prospect of a Trump Presidency “the biggest fuck-you ever recorded in human history.” He then compares it to a similar recent electoral fuck-you: Brexit (“they used the ballot as an anger-management tool, and now they’re fucked”), and sees a Trump Presidency as a similar, though incomparably greater, disaster—the election of “the last American President.” (A comic video parody of a Trump inauguration doesn’t do much to add to the litany of Trump’s self-inflicted ridicule, however.)

Soon thereafter, Moore makes his way to the second part of his grand design. Having made the empathetic case for anger at the status quo, he sets out his case for Hillary Clinton. His idea is simple: what wins elections isn’t numbers per se but motivation, passion, enthusiasm. Clinton, he fears, won’t win, despite the polls, because Trump’s supporters are “decisive, organized, and disciplined,” and, what’s more, mad as hell. He makes clear that he never voted for Bill Clinton (Nader in ’96, he says), that he voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 primary and for Bernie Sanders this year, and he’s up-front about his particular political differences with Hillary Clinton. Then he gets rolling, and his blend of showman’s bravado and rhetorical flair is a thing of beauty.

Moore’s prime argument for Hillary is an argument from character. The first good thing that he can say about Hillary Clinton is that she likes him. He refers to the chapter “My Forbidden Love for Hillary” from his 1996 book “Downsize This!” and describes the White House dinner to which he was invited as a result—in particular, dwelling on the frank and surprisingly specific enthusiasm that Bill Clinton expressed for Moore’s work and the even greater show of enthusiasm with which Hillary followed it. The apparent element of vanity actually plays exactly in the opposite direction—what Moore’s doing here, deftly, is endowing Hillary with longstanding progressive bona fides, bringing her alongside him to share in his fan base.

Moore reinforces that point with a scintillating coup de théâtre: he refers to a scene in his film “Where to Invade Next,” in which he visits a hospital in Estonia to learn why the rate of mortality for women in childbirth is lower there than it is in the United States. While there, he says, he saw a picture on the wall, of Hillary Clinton and the hospital personnel, from the early nineteen-nineties—she was there, Moore says, for the same reason he was. Moore’s enthusiastic praise of Clinton’s health-care initiatives during her husband’s Presidency is matched by his righteous fury at its rejection, at the current state of affairs that deprives so many citizens of adequate health care.

Moore then pivots to his decisive point, a masterstroke of political psychology that he extracts from a sharp history lesson. Citing the personal attacks that Hillary endured while pushing for health care during Bill Clinton’s first Administration and the mockery that she bore for her unwillingness to play the traditional domestic role of a First Lady, he then goes back over her entire career to consider the attacks that she has borne—not over politics but as an ambitious and independent-spirited woman and as Bill Clinton’s wife, living with him in Arkansas and going against her principles to take his last name in the interest of his political career. Moore goes back to Hillary’s student days, playing a clip of her commencement address at her college graduation, and evokes the opposition that an entire generation of early feminists faced as they attempted to speak out for women’s equality at a time when sexual harassment and male prerogatives were utterly commonplace, unaddressed and unredressed.

And then he hits the mark, explaining that women of Hillary’s generation were raised by a generation of mothers, many of whom took jobs during the Second World War to fill positions left vacant when men went off to fight. After the war, he says, most of them returned to domestic life—but they maintained the spirit of self-reliance, of independence, of worldly capability and achievement that they had gained during the war, and they passed it along to their daughters, Hillary among them. With this brilliant idea, Moore wrenches feminism away from the dubiously debated sixties and makes it the work of the Greatest Generation, the achievement not of the vacillating hedonists whom Moore lumps himself in with at the start but of the hard-fighting, hardworking, profoundly earnest and sternly principled ancestors who serve as heroic models for exactly the kind of people who might vote for Trump.

Moore’s final rhetorical stroke is to add that the lifetime of struggle that Hillary has faced (and he cites the struggles of Pope Francis as a comparison) has left her bitterly resentful of the status quo, profoundly progressive in temperament, deeply intent on making decisive changes when, finally, she realizes her lifelong goal of being in a position to make them. In effect, Moore presents a Hillary Clinton whose progressivism arises from no mere butterfly idealism but embodies the hard-won experience of the best American tradition.

Then he can’t help but ice the cake: he dreams of her flurry of executive orders (a conservative’s nightmare); he envisions that she’ll replace old enemies (“Iran and North Korea”) with new ones (“Monsanto and Wells Fargo”); and he puts his own enthusiasm for Clinton on the line with a celebrity-fuelled vow—that if, in two years, she doesn’t deliver on the progressive vision that she promises, he himself will run for President in 2020. (He quickly piles the comedy onto this notion—his first promise is that all electronic devices will use the same charger cord.)

But, by that point in the film, the point at which Moore’s personality and prejudices assert themselves over his principle, the argument has been made and won. Within the carnivalesque atmosphere and high-spirited revelry of Moore’s show, there’s a master of political rhetoric at work, and he devotes that mastery to a high patriotic calling. At its best, “Michael Moore in TrumpLand” is a moving act of devotion, a motivating turn of rhetoric of potentially historic import. The movie, Moore says, will be on view in “three dozen” cities and will become available, in a day or two, on a nationwide streaming platform. At the very least, as the joke goes, it couldn’t hurt.

Hillary Clinton's Incredibly Powerful Defense of Women's Right to Choose

By Tara Culp-Ressler, ThinkProgress

20 October 16

Finally, on the national stage, Clinton reframed the policy issue.

illary Clinton mounted a passionate defense of abortion rights at the final presidential debate on Wednesday night?—?and articulated a progressive vision for approaching the complex policy issue, despite host Chris Wallace’s best attempts to frame the conversation in conservative terms.

The exchange about abortion marked the first time a debate moderator has posed a question on the issue to the presidential candidates.

Clinton, who has staked out an incredibly progressive stance on reproductive rights issues over the course of this campaign, was quick to emphasize that she will “defend women’s rights to make their own health care decisions” because “we have come too far to have that turned back now.”

But the most impressive part of her response was her thoughtful engagement with a complicated subject many Democrats prefer to avoid: abortions that occur later in pregnancy. These procedures are an uncomfortable topic for many people, even those who are broadly supportive of abortion rights.

Clinton pointed out these decisions aren’t ones that families make lightly. They often involve parents grappling with end-of-life care for unborn children who won’t be able to survive outside the womb.

“The kinds of cases that fall at the end of pregnancy are often the most heartbreaking, painful decisions for families to make,” she said. “I have met with women who, toward the end of their pregnancy, get the worst news one could get?—?that their health is in jeopardy if they continue to carry to term, or that something terrible has happened or just been discovered about the pregnancy.”

Several of the questions from Wallace, a Fox News veteran, started out from a right-leaning place, and abortion was no exception.

Wallace asked Clinton to defend her support for “partial-birth abortion,” which is not a real medical term but rather a misleading phrase coined by anti-abortion groups to garner support for banning a specific type of abortion procedure that occurs after the first trimester.

Centering the conversation about reproductive rights on these later procedures is a very popular tactic among abortion opponents. Even though so-called “late-term abortions” are actually quite rare in policy terms?—?the vast majority of abortion patients have their procedures sometime in the first trimester; many of them are early enough in their pregnancies that they can swallow a pill?—?the anti-choice community hones in on these cases as a way of construing abortion as gruesome, upsetting, and bloody.

Focusing on later abortions helps stoke outrage over the moral implications of a medical procedure that falls squarely in a gray area for most Americans. And once a conversation about abortion gets steered to an emotional place, it can be difficult to reel it back in and refocus on the policy matters at hand.

But Clinton was unfazed. Instead of equivocating about whether the government should restrict the later abortion procedures that may sound upsetting to an outside observer, or apologizing for her support for a procedure that some Americans may feel uncomfortable with, she focused on the difficult real-world circumstances that may lead a couple to end a pregnancy in the second or third trimester.

And when Donald Trump eagerly raised the specter of “late-term abortion,” claiming that Hillary Clinton supports babies being “ripped” from their mother’s wombs in the ninth month of pregnancy, she didn’t blink. Clinton sharply rebuked Trump’s inflammatory language.

“That is not what happens in these cases, and using that kind of scare rhetoric is just terribly unfortunate,” she said. “You should meet with some of the women I’ve met with?—?the women I’ve known over the course of my life.”

Clinton’s comments were immediately lauded by female journalists and women’s magazines, held up as an example of Clinton “owning her feminism” and saying “exactly what women needed to hear.”

After decades of mostly male politicians debating whether women should have autonomy over their bodies, it’s no small thing for the first female presidential nominee of a major political party to focus on the lived experiences of women facing complicated pregnancy decisions.

Clinton centered women in a debate that usually treats them as an afterthought. And she defended one of the most controversial aspects of abortion policy without ceding any ground to conservative abortion opponents who would rather talk about the humanity of fetuses than the humanity of women.

This ability to humanize an issue that’s personal to millions of people across the country who grapple with decisions about pregnancy is one of the most important aspects of her candidacy, argues Slate’s Christina Cauterucci.

“When Clinton’s on the stage, it becomes about flesh and blood: women’s bodies and their most private, sacred rights to determine the courses of their own lives,” Cauterucci wrote on Wednesday night. “Of all the reasons it benefits the nation to have more women in politics, this may be the biggest?—?the shift of women’s lives from the realm of hypotheses into the real world.”