The Case for Hillary

(disclaimer: this was written in February 2007, a time before Barack Obama had sponsored and passed the Sudan Divestment and Accountability Act, the Iran Divestment Act, and the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, and also before Hillary Clinton's inept campaign managers steered her towards embarrassing lows. This is one of my more eloquent pieces yet, and in hindsight one of the more regrettable)

It was once noticed by a young Governor of Arkansas that whereas Republicans tend to fall in line in presidential politics, Democrats want to fall in love. And last summer my heart was won by an assertive, intelligent woman named Hillary Rodham Clinton. While working as an intern in her Washington office, my conversation with the outside world usually began with a single question: “Is she running for president?” The unfortunate truth is that even such an influential figure as myself, the Deputy Secretary of the Copying Machine, was not quite in the loop. But as I spent my summer delivering her mail and alphabetizing her files, I did acquire much admiration for the way she does business.

To begin, the Clinton operation has perfected politics to a science, and it goes without saying that this team is capable of running things on a larger scale. But before delving into what policies might be enacted in any future Clinton administration, we must determine whether such a thing is even possible. When deciding upon the best standard-bearer for any particular election, the smart thing for a party to do would be – in this order – to first determine whether a candidate actually has a shot of winning, and only then choose from the possible victors he or she whose policies are the most to your liking. According to my calculations, Hillary is not merely the best candidate, but she is the only candidate that Democrats can put forward if we are to win back the White House in 2008.

The most widespread myth about Hillary Clinton is that she engenders so much antipathy among the population at large that it would be foolish to choose such a lightning rod. There is indeed a vast, right-wing conspiracy which really, really hates her. And these same people hated the supposedly “electable” Gore and Kerry, and they will similarly spout no less vitriol at Obama, Edwards, and any other non-Republican candidate – because that is their job. Yet these hacks are irrelevant, because their audience is a segment of the population which is never going to cast their ballot for a Democrat anyway. Among liberal and unaffiliated swing voters – the much larger segment of the electorate whose ballots decide elections – polls show that Clinton remains a very popular figure. In fact, if the election were held today and Hillary Clinton were our nominee, all evidence suggests that there would be a Democrat sitting in the Oval Office.

The response of most self-ascribed liberals in regards to Hillary runs along the lines of “I like her, but I don’t think that she can win.” The conventional wisdom that Clinton is simply unelectable must be shattered immediately. According to an ABC/Washington Post poll taken the day after she announced her candidacy, Hillary Clinton was the only Democratic candidate who would be able to beat the most competitive Republican, Rudy Giuliani. The same poll finds that she would beat the presumed Republican nominee John McCain by 6 points. No other Democratic candidate comes close. One can argue that any current data is skewed by early name-recognition, but the fact is that Obama and Edwards are running considerably to the left of Clinton – too far for the comfort of many swing voters, and that all evidence suggests that they are more likely to lose the general election.

Rhetoric about hope and transcendence is certainly moving, but if you want to hear inspiring rhetoric, go to church. If you want to be inspired by politics, go for someone who knows how to change public policy. Barack Obama and John Edwards have put forward worthy proposals, but during their tenures in Congress neither of them have demonstrated any ability to get things done. Though after slightly more than six years in the world’s most august deliberative chamber, the junior Senator from New York has been able to work across the aisle in a hostile Republican Congress to pass legislation on issues as various as homeland security, health care, pharmaceutical safety, emergency contraception, veterans benefits, education, and economic development. The measure of a politician is whether or not they can get things done, and by that standard Hillary Clinton is as good as they come.

Naysayers on the right claim depict her as a sort of socialist peacenik, and her detractors on the left accuse her of being acquiescent with the forces of reaction – both are wrong. A good bet is that if someone in public office is being met with enmity from the ideologues from both sides of the aisle, it is an indication that they are doing something right.

The Clintons’ governing philosophy is that “government can be a positive force in the lives of Americans”, and this modest truism is more refreshing than you might think. By November of 2008, the American people will have been living through their eighth year of an administration which deliberately runs up debt in order to justify its underfunding of all non-military spending programs, has nonchalantly overseen a rise in Americans living without health insurance and in poverty, has failed to protect its own citizens from natural disaster, has botched not one but two wars and has then proceeded to neglect our veterans. This is what happens when we are cursed with public servants who willfully demonstrate the Reaganite dogma that government itself is the problem. Our country does not need a revolution; what we need is a government that works, and that is what Hillary Clinton’s brand of substantive politics promises to deliver.

The primary duty of the government is to ensure the health and safety of its citizens. These self-interested, even conservative ends might not sound particularly romantic, but they are the paramount concerns of the vast majority of Americans – and also just happen to be precisely the fields in which Clinton has demonstrated her prowess. This is hardly a concession to the right; if anything, it is central to the understanding of the need for effective public policy. Clinton has found not only found a sound agenda but also a winning campaign formula of national security and economic security, and if elected, she will dedicate her administration to stabilizing the health care, energy and job markets as well as the geopolitical situation in the Middle East.

Health care is an issue which Hillary Clinton has essentially owned since she chaired the commission on health care reform in the 1990s. Then she proposed a great increase in government intervention, but such pipedreams have laid dormant while Congress has been in Republican hands. Reading the political environment as it is, she has successfully achieved more incremental reform in the realm of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, computerizing health care records, stem cell research and over-the-counter birth control than her grand ambitions of universal health insurance. But America’s health care crisis is still one of the most poignant issues in the public sphere, and now that Congress is in Democratic hands Senator Clinton will probably take the lead on a major initiative in the near future to expand government subsidies for health insurance, legally compel individuals to purchase it through the private sector, or both.

Clinton is squarely among the most hawkish members of the Democratic caucus, and rightly so, for as a Senator whose constituents were the primary targets of the 9/11 hijackers, New Yorkers are particularly concerned about homeland security. Too many liberals are wont to scoff at this subject as to do so it to at least recognizes the intentions of the Bush administration in its failed policies, and – in a few instances – where they might have even gotten things right. But the fact is that anyone who wants to be considered for the role of Commander in Chief must be well-versed in the duties that entails. On the home front, Senator Clinton has been especially attuned to the issue’s steak and potatoes; enhancing security in airlines, railroads, ports and nuclear power plants, and one of her biggest fights as of late has been to scrap the absurd formula which allocates more counterterrorism dollars per capita to small states Wyoming than those like New York which were actually struck by al-Qaeda and replace it with a rational, risk-based regime.

Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy is essentially the War on Terror liberalism espoused in Peter Beinart’s The Good Fight. Clinton aptly grasps that the enormous challenges which our country faces cannot be avoided with the puerile instincts of isolationism and narrow self-interest, but that these generational endeavors require a robust government to lead the nation in collective action, harnessing the power of democracy and free markets to secure the greater societal interest. She welcomes the integration of the world market as an incentive for the increased competitiveness of the American economy, sees global warming as a test of our ability to reform our means of production, and she maneuvers on our mission in Afghanistan to enlarge our military and humanitarian presence.

In regards to the single most controversial and consequential foreign policy issue of the day, Senator Clinton can be fairly described as a hawk as she voted for the resolution which authorized the President to use force against Saddam Hussein. Peacenik activists have used the fact that Clinton has not explicitly apologized for her vote as alleged proof that she is not sufficiently antiwar, but this is petty theatrics. The real question at hand is what, if elected, Hillary Clinton would do in regards to the current situation in Iraq, and that she stated pretty clearly at this winter’s DNC meeting, “If we in Congress don't end this war before January 2009, as president, I will." In all fairness her promise is quite vague, but then again, Eisenhower ran on no more than the simple pledge that “I will go to Korea.” And he won, and he did, and so will Hillary.

Hillary Clinton has been skeptical about a firm timetable for withdrawal, and for this she has been decried by the leftist blogosphere as undifferentiable from the status quo. That is not the case, for Clinton has since called for the government to “change the course in Iraq” and supports the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations to withdraw the majority of troops by 2008 – which is essentially a timetable in all but name. And instead of retreating from Iraq with a pacifist worldview, Senator Clinton believes that there are still wars worth fighting; namely the war in Afghanistan, the Darfur genocide and the rest of the Global War on Terrorism.

The other lingering concern about Hillary is the role that will be played by her spouse in her campaign and administration. Will she run as her own woman and distance herself from the memory of the peace and prosperity of the prior Clinton administration, or will she let the aspiring First Husband publicly work on her behalf and essentially assume the role which she played in 1992 and 1996? Let us just say that it would be laughably absurd for Hillary Clinton to run away from her political mentor and the man who gave her last name. There are few individuals with a greater understanding of the federal government than infamous policy wonk Bill, and it would not be unfathomable to picture the relatively young ex-president as Secretary of State, diplomatic envoy to the Middle East, or some sort of advisor to the President. In comparison, instead of receiving advice from his accomplished father and former President George H.W. Bush, current President George W. Bush consults “a higher father”. Who would you prefer to lead the free world; someone who takes their advice from God, or someone whose chief political advisor is Bill Clinton?
I rest my case.

The Progressive Case for John McCain

(circa September 2007, when it looked like the GOP was going to nominate either Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani and the thought of John McCain sitting in the Oval Office was relatively less conducive to me shitting my pants)

If you have spent more than 30 seconds in my presence, you probably know that I am 1) obsessed with politics, and 2) very, very liberal. This is my third semester as President of the Amherst College Democrats, and I spent last summer working for my Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. And I believe that John McCain has the potential to make an excellent President.

My initial response to the man is quite inexplicable. At the utterance of his name, I feel like Frank Sinatra’s character in The Manchurian Candidate, as though I have been brainwashed into believing that “John McCain is the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known.” After reading his memoirs about serving as a Navy pilot in Vietnam and spending five years as a prisoner of war, I too am impressed by this man’s acts of courage.

But when it comes to candidates, it is policy and not personality that truly matters. And John McCain is a very conservative Republican. He was first elected as Arizona’s Senator by promising to continue the legacy of his predecessor: Barry Goldwater, the very founder of the modern conservative movement. However, this school of thought is very different from the Christian fundamentalism and crony capitalism which defines the current administration. McCain’s mode of conservatism is predicated on the rule of law, economic prudence, and competent management of the American Empire.

A John McCain presidency should not frighten liberals, for assuming that the makeup of Congress does not change, whoever sits in the Oval Office in 2009 will see bills on their desk written by Democratic committee chairs. If there were to be a government divided with a very progressive Congress and an open-minded Republican President, we can expect a flurry of enormous legislative accomplishments.

The best example is what McCain would do in regards to global warming. He has coauthored legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and if given the opportunity, would use the most powerful office in the world to take on this daunting endeavor. Only the rare individual like John McCain could establish the notion that preserving the polar ice caps is an inherently conservative end and vital for our national security. With the clock ticking towards the point of no return, it might thus be in the global interest for McCain to be our next President.

In the realm of economics, an analogy can be made that John McCain is to George W. Bush as Theodore Roosevelt was to William McKinley. Whereas Bush has ascribed to any policy desired by his campaign financiers, McCain has campaigned to end corporate welfare as we know it. He voted against subsidies to the oil companies and to the pharmaceutical companies. Indeed, McCain’s conception of free markets includes the correction of market failures, having advocated stricter regulation of the auto industry, the accounting industry, the tobacco industry, even the campaign finance industry. Indeed, he is a small-government Republican, but a McCain administration could very well revive the long-dormant spirit of Progressive Republicanism.

John McCain is a social conservative, but he adheres to the authority of binding precedent more than the fatwas of the Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Particularly after the South Carolina primary in 2000, in which the Bush campaign made an issue out of the color of his daughter’s skin, McCain is openly hostile to the culture warriors of his party whom he has labeled as “agents of intolerance.” McCain is pro-life, but supports federally-financed stem cell research. He opposes same-sex marriage, but he also opposes banning it with a constitutional amendment, which he described “as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans.” On illegal immigration, he is one of the primary champions of allowing illegal aliens to become full citizens. Altogether, his positions are sufficiently to the right in order to pass his party’s ideological litmus test, and in some instances he is quite liberal.

Any liberal optimism for John McCain is tempered, however, by his stance on the single most important question which faces the American nation today: the war in Iraq. He does not march in lockstep with the Bush administration, having distanced himself from its treatment of detainees, but McCain is nevertheless accused to be a facilitator of the larger, failing mission. This accusation is well founded, for he still argues that the war can be won with sufficient reinforcements; the so-called McCain Doctrine of escalation.

It seems strange that the former straight-talker would take this occasion to deny perceptible reality, but the about-face signals the dilemma which all Republicans face in 2008. The next presidential election is sure to be all but defined by the war in Iraq, and this enormously unpopular undertaking has lost the backing of all but the most dogmatic members of the Grand Old Party. Anyone who wants to receive the party’s nomination must win over the increasingly-dwindling voters who wish to stay the course, and so every single Republican candidate, McCain included, now has to kowtow to what is but a peripheral element of the general electorate.

My prediction is that once the primaries have been decided, John McCain is going to reestablish himself as the straight-talking centrist reformer who we saw in 2000. If Candidate McCain chooses a likeminded moderate like Rudy Giuliani as his running-mate, the result will be a Republican administration which could implement an agenda with broad-based popular support. And just as only Nixon could go to China, perhaps John McCain can then extricate the United States from Iraq.

There is more at stake in the next election than party and personality, and even this loyal Democrat has respect for the virtues of conservatism. As a young idealist considering a career in public service, in fact, I would be proud to work under the leadership of a President McCain.

On the Movement Against the War in Iraq

As one of the many Americans opposed to the war in Iraq, I make a habit of going to demonstrations where I can fraternize with sympathetic souls. They tend to be enjoyable events where I can express myself, get a good cardiovascular workout and reunite with missed friends. But as I was wandering the National Mall on January 27, my optimism for a looming change in foreign policy was joined with reserved skepticism towards my fellow demonstrators.

Hundreds of thousands of people marched on Washington that day to express their desire for an end to the Iraq War, mostly the kind of people you would expect to see at a rally like this; disgruntled veterans, grieving family members, Catholic and Quaker pacifists, organized labor, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Hollywood stars, and lefty gadflies like Dennis Kucinich. But most of those who came to express their dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs cannot be pigeonholed so easily; after all, to be a critic of the war is now to find oneself firmly within the mainstream of American public opinion. This is why I have such faith in this movement’s potential to succeed in ending the war in Iraq, and why I am also so discouraged with its current leadership.

My frustration can be best illustrated by my experience on the bus to our nation’s capitol. Participants shared their thoughts over the loudspeaker to pass the time, so I encouraged my fellow disaffected students to register to vote, write to their Congressmen, and to even consider a career in public service. The response was terrifying; self-proclaimed Anarchists, Communists and Islamic Revolutionaries shouted down this “white bourgeois reactionary” for daring to work within the institutions of American democracy – as opposed to plotting its violent overthrow. With this it dawned on me that the biggest obstacle to ending the Iraq War might well be the antiwar movement itself.

This earnest student of American politics believes that for the opinions of the common citizenry to translate into substantive results, Iraq activists must learn the ways of Washington realpolitik. And what I am advocating is not merely superficial change. The fact is are that the plurality of Americans are against the war, but many lawmakers are still wary of being associated with the radical groups and ideologies which make up the most visible elements of the war’s opposition. And rightly so, for as awful as the war is, many of these factions are rather despicable themselves.

On the Mall that day, demonstrators called for not just withdrawal from Iraq, but the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia and every other country in the world in which there is a United States military presence. As some students scrawled on their makeshift riot gear, “US Out of Everywhere.” The reemergence of such sentiment has been one of the unfortunate consequences of our disastrous entanglement along the Tigris and Euphrates, but this is not so much of an indictment of the administration as it is of those who have fallen prey to the seductive logic of pacifist isolationism. The belief that military intervention is necessarily wrong in all places and at all times is as dogmatic and fanciful as the neoconservative ideology which begat this mess in the first place. Though opposition to the protection of American interests can be dismissed as naïve idealism, what is truly reprehensible about this intellectually bankrupt philosophy is that it precludes even the use of force for humanitarian ends (such as intervening to end the Darfur genocide) for the sake of avoiding the appearance of American imperialism. What is precisely wrong with the vocal leadership of the current antiwar movement, why it creates such problems for those in the reality-based community, is that it is not merely anti-war in Iraq but anti-war.

Before considering anything else, the discourse on American foreign policy must recognize that there are wars worth fighting. The United States must exercise some degree of intervention in Iraq and the Middle East as we have indeed vital national security interests which necessitate the preservation of political stability in the region; namely, continued access to the oil supplies and a moderate public opinion towards the West. The preemptive invasion and continued occupation of Iraq has been such a tragic mistake for this very reason, because it has overextended our armed forces, fractured the international counterterrorism consensus, diverted scarce resources away from eliminating the Al Qaeda network and Afghanistan’s resurgent Taliban, and has engendered greater willingness for Muslim youth to join extremist groups hostile to the United States. Any arguments about the moral or ethical dimensions of American foreign policy aside, what is more important is the national interest-based rationale for withdrawal; strategic redeployment from Iraq is necessary because our country’s current path is counterproductive to the larger objectives of the Global War on Terrorism.

As the dovish multitude hundreds of thousands strong passed the rather pathetic counterdemonstration of no more than a few dozen hawks, one of the endangered species held out a sign which actually brought up a good point: “Why aren’t you protesting the terrorists?” From the speakers’ rostrum there was much anger directed towards the American sins of Haditha and Abu Ghraib, but very little was said about the even greater evils which brought about this overreaction in the first place. Though I hate to invoke such imagery, anyone who has seen the charred remnants of Ground Zero knows the consequences of failed government policy towards anti-American Islamic fundamentalist movements, there was little evidence that anyone at the rally had any suggestions for dealing with our geopolitical rivals other than the doctrine of laissez faire.

Unfortunately, one of the pitfalls to which the antiwar crowd often succumbs is the sophistry that any foreign occupation must be wrong, and therefore any opposing faction must be in the right; this illogic has resulted in the morphing of some genuinely concerned lovers of peace and freedom into apologists for quite violent, illiberal movements such as the Mahdi Army, Hezbollah and Hamas. Though such groups’ demands for national sovereignty are certainly worthy, the former’s anti-Sunni pogroms and the latter two’s orchestration of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, among other things, make it difficult to believe that there is anything truly democratic about them. As Harry Truman found himself on the eve of the Cold War flanked by redbaiters on the right as well as Communist sympathizers on the left, today’s liberals must also hold a careful line against both ideological extremes.

Despite its organizers’ faults, what nevertheless makes the movement against the Iraq War so promising is that it represents the will of the overwhelming majority of Americans. This significant fact is unfortunately overlooked by the most prominent group coordinating antiwar activism, United for Peace and Justice, which operates as a motley federation of narrow interest groups and counterculturalists. If they wish to ever have a role in the peacemaking process, they should take a cue from the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah leadership and begin a mass purge of their most extremist member groups; to begin, the Communist Party. Any benefit that including such fringe groups might have in bringing bodies to a rally is certainly offset by the fact that few mainstream politicians will dare touch it with a ten foot pole. Among those which should be expunged from the coalition are groups dedicated to the Palestinian national liberation movement, for regardless of whether they are right or wrong, they are but a distraction to the issue at hand. Just as Lincoln refrained from invoking the abolition of slavery during the Civil War so as to keep the border-states in the Union camp, in the effort to establish a national consensus against the current policy in Iraq there is absolutely no reason to invoke the single most venomous controversy in the entire world. Since there has been no indication of United for Peace and Justice’s desire to remake itself, the mantle of the movement should be passed on to more effective liberal groups such as MoveOn, Campus Progress and particularly the ad hoc Win Without War – which labels itself as “a mainstream voice advocating an end to the war in Iraq”.

The only way for the energy and idealism of the antiwar movement to translate into tangible results is for all of the folks who show up to peace vigils put down their Chomsky readers and accept that the only way that they are going to ever get anything done is through the American institutions of capitalism and democracy. There is no need to reinvent the wheel when the available means are quite sufficient to attain our goals. As a matter of fact, the gears have already begun to churn in our favor.
If activists wish to actually bring this misbegotten war to an end, the first thing that we must adequately grasp is how profoundly the political dynamic has changed since last November’s elections, namely that we now have a Democratic Congress largely as a result of antiwar sentiment. Now that advocates of exercising the legislative branch’s constitutional authority to change course in Iraq are firmly ensconced in the most powerful corridors of Capitol Hill, the difference that can be made by the old-fashioned traditions of civic activism have already begun to show. Now even stalwarts of the Republican foreign policy tradition like Senators John Warner, Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel have decided to resist the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq – which according to the latest Pew Research Group poll is now supported by a paltry 23% of Americans. What shall actually be done still remains up for speculation.

The primary objective of the movement against this ill-fated war should now be the passage of legislation calling for a binding timetable for the withdrawal from Iraq – this should be the antiwar movement’s holy grail. This bill will need to be approved in both houses by not just simple majorities, but by at least two-thirds majorities that can sustain President Bush’s certain veto. For the Whips to accumulate sufficient votes remains and uphill battle, but we private citizens can do much more than simply watch from the sidelines.

The first avenue for the great vocal majority to make the timetable for withdrawal into reality is the race for the next Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces. As the current holder of that title has made clear, how to end the war in Iraq shall be bequeathed to his successor, and the identity of the next Decider will be is up to us to decide. So register to vote, take part in the primary and of course the general election – even if you are a Republican. If you are willing to spend your weekend at an antiwar rally, it is worth your time to get seriously involved in an electoral campaign.

The second avenue is lighter on democracy and heavier on capitalism. As we have learned by recent events, one of the most effective ways for private citizens to effect change is through their Rolodexes and checkbooks. Yes, what I am calling for is for the antiwar movement to reach its apex of political sophistication and entrench itself in the business of campaign finance.

Go to all the antiwar demonstrations your heart desires, but if you want to make a real difference, this is my advice: tune in, turn on, and get involved in the democratic process. Partaking in this game of wealth and power might require the most principled of us to hold our noses and learn to compromise, but that’s politics.