BY TOM TOMORROW
Lame Duck pulled out some of that bold, decisive leadership in his final State of the Union.
And so I call on Congress to pass legislation that bans unethical practices such as the buying, selling, patenting or cloning of human life.
I think Abraham Lincoln already beat you to the first two.
The primary is getting exhausting. It’s bad enough that anti-McCain smears get in-depth rebuttals by the media while anti-Obama smears get turned into debate questions. Now we have to deal with a fight on the Democratic side so nasty that it could drive voters away from the party and once again prove that Democrats have a supernatural ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. That said, despite how nauseating I’ve been finding the campaigns, there are some stark differences between the candidates. Here’s where I stand on the top three Dems.
Hillary Clinton – Right now, my approach towards the Democratic primary is ABC, Anyone But Clinton. She seems like a good enough person and I honestly believe that she’d be much better than any of the Republicans running for president. That said, I despise her campaign. I’m not to the Andrew Sullivan-level of irrational hatred, but I think the reasons for voting for her are largely bogus and the reasons to vote against her are mounting every day.
For starters, Clinton’s biggest selling point has been her “experience”, but as Timothy Noah wrote at Slate, Hillary’s claim of experience is incredibly dishonest :
[D]uring her husband’s two terms in office, Hillary Clinton did not hold a security clearance, did not attend meetings of the National Security Council, and was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. During trips to Bosnia and Kosovo, she “acted as a spokeswoman for American interests rather than as a negotiator.” On military affairs, most of her experience derives not from her White House years but from serving on the Senate armed services committee.
Even if she was able to claim Bill’s experience as her own, what is there to brag about? NAFTA? Welfare reform? Dont Ask, Don’t Tell? The Communications Decency Act? Easing media ownership laws? Defense of Marriage Act? If she wants to run on her husband’s record, then it’s worth pointing out that the Clinton Administration wasn’t the progressive paradise that she’s promising.
During the Clinton years, there was one big “accomplishment” that she can claim…her failure to enact universal healthcare. Considering that one of her biggest promises on the stump has been universal healthcare, I’d expect the “most experienced” candidate to have a better pitch in this regard than “second time’s the charm”. If Hillary can learn from the mistakes she made in 1994, who’s to say the other candidates can’t also learn those lessons?
Of course, another point against Hillary is that I don’t think she’s truly taken the lessons of the Clinton years to heart. She came into Washington in 1992 and the GOP establishment destroyed her and her husband. She was seen as arrogant for trying to use her position as first lady to strive for universal healthcare, demonized as a corrupt witch for Whitewater, and had to sit idly by while the GOP leadership in Washington dragged the nation through impeachment. Yet though all of that, she and Bill are still naive enough to believe that they can triangulate their way towards legislative victories and trust people who have shown them nothing but contempt.
Yet once Hillary became a Senator, for all of her talk about the “vast right-wing conspiracy”, she was foolish enough to give the benefit of the doubt to people who have proved themselves to be untrustworthy. She voted for the Iraq war, the bankruptcy bill, declaring Iran’s revolutionary Guard a Terrorist organization, etc. She’s obviously not as bad as the Republicans in this regard, but for somebody who’s been through the bullshit she’s been through, I’d expect a little more skepticism.
For all the futile centrism of the Clinton approach to governing, that same “play nice” act doesn’t seem to apply to her fellow Democratic candidates. After New Hampshire, she claimed to have “found [her] voice”, but the last two weeks make it clear that her campaign’s new voice is just as vile and two-faced as the old voice. This good cop / bad cop horseshit she’s been playing with her surrogates is shameful to watch. The worst part is, it’s probably going to work. If they get Obama to argue back, then they can subvert his post-partisan appeal by making it look like both sides are being nasty. Or they might just get lucky and some of their slander will catch on.
The best thing I can say about Hillary right now is that if she becomes the nominee, we’ll have a Democrat who isn’t afraid to bring a knife to a gun fight.
Barack Obama – I’ll cop to being won over by his speeches, being inspired to the point where I start to believe that he’ll be able to unite people behind a progressive agenda. When the excitement of his speeches wears off, however, I can’t help but think that Obama’s insistence that he can unite Americans behind him is as naive as Clinton’s that her experience will enable her to get universal healthcare through Congress.
After watching Edwards’ campaign fail over the last few weeks, Obama’s become my de facto candidate of choice (ABC, remember?). Unfortunately, looking at the polling over the last couple of contests, I think he’s screwed. He does great with independents, but that doesn’t win him the Democratic nomination. I’ve long assumed that Obama is more liberal than Hillary, but that really isn’t based on anything more than a hunch. It certainly isn’t supported by the substance of his stump speeches.
But I still suspect that Obama’s got a lefty radical side that we’re not seeing on the campaign trail. I was clicking around a few political sites when I found this photo that really struck me :
Downplaying his liberal past (and present?) isn’t doing him any favors among Democratic partisans. While it hurts him that Clinton has been out-polling him among Democratic voters, the real kicker is that Obama got his ass kicked in Nevada. Like Iowa, the primary seemed tailor-made for Obama. Since Nevada allowed same day registration, Obama should have been able to mobilize a lot of independent voters to the essentially open Democratic primaries. Also, like Iowa, the fact that it was a caucus should have delievered Obama a lot of “second choice” support, but with Edwards only getting 4%, the assumption that Edwards supporters would automatically go to Obama now seems discredited. Doing poorly in that caucus doesn’t bode well for the rest of the primary campaign.
Which is a shame because he’d be a better president than Hillary.
John Edwards – At this point it’s a foregone conclusion that he can’t win the nomination. I still think he’d be a great president, but the media blackout of his campaign made it an uphill battle. Assuming he loses in South Carolina as bad as he did in Nevada, then I’m guessing he’ll drop out. Or maybe stick it out until Super Tuesday. In fact, the same media who spent the last year ignoring his campaign is now finally paying attention, but only to wonder aloud whether or not he’ll play “kingmaker”.
I hope he sticks around. It would be easy for Edwards to follow the standard losing campaign playbook and use a concession speech to drop out and maybe endorse either Obama or Clinton. Considering that Edwards has been bringing up issues that the other mainstream candidates would rather avoid addressing (like the stranglehold corporate lobbies have over our democratic process), it would be a letdown to lose his advocacy on the campaign trail. If Obama or Clinton want the support of the remaining Edwards voters, they should earn it by addressing the issues that Edwards has made the centerpiece of his campaign.
The other night while watching a CNN report on Ron Paul’s racist newsletter, my wife made a good observation. If you give Ron Paul the benefit of the doubt that the written-in-the-first-person and published-under-his-name racist ranting that (among many other things) refers to African-Americans as “animals” were written by other people…then is this really the kinda guy who should be President? If Ron Paul is so irresponsible that he let his quaint little newsletter “accidentally” turn into vile, right-wing extremist rag, then what does that say about how competent he’d be in overseeing something as large and complex as the executive branch of the federal government? The guy can’t even keep hate speech out of his photocopied little mailing list. On top of that, if Ron Paul turned his newsletter over to the kind of people who would write this shit, then what kinda neo-Nazi conspiracy theorists can we expect to see in a Ron Paul administration?
Once again, this is all assuming that you believe Ron Paul’s story, which I don’t.
I’m fascinated by the way the Clinton campaign is dealing with the challenge of changing their message in the four days between Iowa and New Hampshire. Hillary’s newest line seems to be that all three Democratic candidates are agents of “change” (anyone tired of hearing that word yet?), but that she’s the only one who can actually accomplish that change. It’s a twist on her “demand it, hope for it, work hard for it” line, but her rhetoric doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny.
For example, here’s a revealing line in her latest stump speech from Ezra Klein :
Clinton now has this line where she says (slight paraphrase, as I’m hand-transcribing), “Let’s be serious about change. Change isn’t voting for the PATRIOT Act then criticizing it. Change isn’t saying you won’t take lobbyist money then appointing a lobbyist as head of your New Hampshire campaign. Change isn’t bragging about passing the Patient’s Bill of Rights when it never passed. Change isn’t talking about your opposition to the Iraq War then voting for more funding.”
Those are attacks on, in order, Edwards, Obama, Edwards, and Obama. But what’s interesting about the charges is the direction in which they point. On each of the relevant issues there, Hillary is on the wrong side of her own rhetoric. She voted for the PATRIOT Act. She voted for the war. She takes lobbyist money and defends their contributions. And she voted for the PBR, and also couldn’t pass it. None are issues that give her any advantage.
An even more telling example of the pot calling the kettle black is this contradiction in Hillary’s depressing (as Obama put it) claim that Obama and Edwards offer “false hopes”.
I suppose that in pure campaigning terms, Kevin Drum’s right and Hillary Clinton’s complaints about Barack Obama and John Edwards raising “false hopes” was a gaffe. But I think it’s an interesting theme, and sort of wish she would explore it in a more rigorous and thorough way.
The trouble is that as is, she’s raising essentially the same hopes as her competitors — hopes of fundamental change in health care and energy policy…It’s true that high aspirations and inspiring rhetoric won’t produce fundamental policy shifts. It’s also true that getting really outraged won’t produce fundamental policy shifts. But neither will Clinton’s years of experience — you can see it in her own list of legislative accomplishments as Senator and First Lady, there’s just nothing in there of remotely the sort of scale that she’s now promising.
So if it’s true that Edwards and Obama are raising false hopes, then so is she.
While some may consider Hillary’s “false hopes” line a gaffe, the truly depressing thing seems to be that it’s a pretty accurate reflection of her feelings.
Hillary was asked about Obama’s rejoinder that there’s something vaguely un-American about dismissing hopes as false, and that it doesn’t jibe with the careers of figures like like John F. Kennedy and King.
“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” Clinton said. “It took a president to get it done.”
Ugghhh….this reminds me of the Mr. Show sketch in which they tried to solicit hate mail :
The Clinton implosion continues. In the past two days, Hillary Clinton has expressed anger and sadness. Granted, some of you might argue “Her supposed ‘anger’ during Saturday’s debate was completely exaggerated.” or “Hillary didn’t burst into tears the way the Republican leader in the Senate does every time someone mentions Iraq.”, but that’s all beside the point. I don’t know if we can afford to have a commander-in-chief that expresses emotion (in public!).
As an aside, if Hillary really wants to compete with Obama, she needs to stop acting so stiff and be a bit more “likeable“, but not in a way that exposes her to any criticism. At least, that’s what I gather from the punditocracy’s ‘”conventional wisdom” that insists that she open herself up to voters but treats her like a emotionally-fragile bitch when she acts like a normal human being.