I’ve read more than a few published posts about the New Hampshire Democrats labeling fiasco for the Kennedy-Clinton dinner. There are a few here at GraniteGrok. But this one was so much fun I had to share it.
It’s an ancient tradition, this Kennedy-Clinton Dinner. Goes all the way back to 2016. (Is anybody reading this old enough to remember 2016?) That year, it was held in late October (or so the chronicles say), just 10 days before Hillary Rodham won her great victory and became president of the United States.
She did, didn’t she? My 2016 history is a little rusty.
Matt McDonald, writing at the Newbostonpost.com reminds us who the dinner used to be named after.
Now, for you antiquarians, long before 2016 the Kennedy-Clinton Dinner had another name. As in many other states, the New Hampshire Democratic Party used to call its annual fund raiser the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, after the two presidents that Democrats consider their founders.
They would be Thomas Jefferson, the slaveholder, and Andrew Jackson, the slaveholder and oppressor of Elizabeth Warren’s non-ancestors.
Before our present enlightened age, most people looked at our past leaders as sort of a mixed bag – more or less memorable, more or less unmemorable; more or less good, more or less bad. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were at the top, and everyone else vied for somewhere in the middle.
Jefferson, for instance: Nobody admired him for his slave-owning, his lavish personal spending and accumulation of debts, his prickly personality, his hypocrisy, or his deviousness. Everyone (once upon a time) admired his inventions, the Louisiana Purchase, the University of Virginia, and that Declaration thingy.
No more. Now these men of the past are remembered for whether they could win the endorsement of the Daily Kos.
And who they replaced those guys with.
The new Democratic Party is nothing if not modern. So why not go with statesmen from the modern age?
What could go wrong?
Except that Democrats are apparently just now hearing about Bill Clinton’s treatment of women. Some people are claiming he wasn’t always as a good a listener as he might have been.
There’s more. Go check it out.
