Gillibrand ‘88 Offers Message of Unity, But Few Niceties, In Visit to Alma Mater

New York Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand, a 1988 graduate of the College, became the first 2020 candidate to visit Dartmouth, speaking to a packed crowed of 400 in Alumni Hall on the sixteenth of last month. In remarks to the students, alumni, and area locals gathered to see the erstwhile conservative Democrat turned postulant progressive icon, Ms. Gillibrand highlighted her ability to bring voters together, describing how she won over a mostly Republican district of upstate New York and then won election to the United States Senate by a wide margin. Her electoral success was, she argued, illustrative of her ability to bring Americans of all stripes together. Such blandly inspirational rhetoric has been common from the left throughout the buildup to 2020, but in Gillibrand’s case is highly laughable. Her transformation from “Blue Dog Democrat”-hawkish on foreign policy and socially conservative-to the liberal firebrand which she is on occasion capable of playing convincingly shows that she, like most in the Democratic Party, has developed her political beliefs not out of genuine conviction but out of a desire for power within the party and on the national level. Ms. Gillibrand’s focus on unity and positivity, vague and uncontroversial topics which many in her party including Obama wannabes Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have also tried to focus on in light of actual policy, is perhaps demonstrative of the inability of the Democrats to form a coherent political platform outside of opposition to Trump, and the sort of pie-in-the-sky proposals (free university and the Green New Deal, among others) previously relegated to the most extreme sphere of leftist discourse. The ill-defined political platform which Ms. Gillibrand presented in her return to her alma mater demonstrates a candidacy and a political party defined not by a vision for America but merely opposition to the one presented on the other side.