If you don’t go to read what Charlie says you should, before you come here, really but you know whenever.  What amounts to his endorsement of HRC is worth reading in its entirety.

However, and this is a big however, I think you make your decision this time around based on how deeply she understands the changes that have been wrought in the country and in its people in the days since the twin catastrophes of the Iraq War and the near-destruction of the world economy eight years ago. Does she know that the political world has changed, and that the universe of options available to a Democratic president is wider now even than it was when Barack Obama took office?

My call, strictly from the elbows, is that she does. She has a good, tough plan to pursue further reforms in the financial sector. She has gone far out on a limb publicly regarding the TPP agreement and the need for urgent action on the climate crisis.

He notes that it is very important for Clinton skeptics to keep in mind the vast difference between the world her husband was elected in and the world today.  It is why I was cautiously optimistic as far back as 4 years ago that a HRC presidency could be assumed to not be a repeat of Bill’s triangulation and centrism.  And now that she’s had the equivalent of a political tilt-a-whirl named Bernie Sanders pull her to the left, there’s room for real optimism for progressives.  With a Democratic Senate we could see a very consequential presidency.

She will have won because people like Elizabeth Warren, and Sherrod Brown and, most of all, Bernie Sanders, worked for several years to create a force that broke up the coronation and pushed her off easy positions and in the direction that HRC’s most earnest admirers insist she wanted to go all along. (Remember that, all during the first Clinton presidency, it was something of an article of faith that HRC was a leading liberal voice within the administration.)

Room for optimism. Which from me, and Charlie, is a rave.