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 Chickens Have Come Home to Roost in Connecticut

(September 2006)

One of the rarest political phenomena has occurred in the Connecticut Senate race: the primary defeat of a sitting United States Senator. In any normal election cycle, Joe Lieberman would have been re-elected in a cakewalk. But during this year in which Iraq has descended into a sectarian civil war, the nationalist insurgency has shown no sign abating, and it has become increasingly more apparent that the current administration’s policy in that country is an abysmal failure, even Democratic icons such as Connecticut’s junior Senator are at risk of losing their job. The reason for this is quite simple: Joe Lieberman is one of America’s most visible proponents of the Iraq War, and the citizens of Connecticut have accordingly expressed their discontent by voting for his challenger.

Some critics declare the insurgent campaign of Ned Lamont – now the official Democratic nominee for Connecticut’s Senate post – as representative of everything that is wrong with the current political system. Columnist David Brooks describes Lamont as the personification of a polarized electorate and a Democratic Party so beholden to leftist bloggers that it is incapable of tolerating intellectual diversity. Vice President Dick Cheney claims that Lamont’s primary victory indicates nothing less than the cowardice of a Party so unfit to conduct the Global War on Terrorism that it, in fact, encourages “al Qaeda types” to think that "they can break the will of the American people."

Anyone conversant in the language of spin should be able to see through this crude analysis and see that Lamont’s primary victory over Lieberman was not some Stalinist purge to maintain ideological conformity, but rather proof that our system of representative government is indeed healthy and functioning. The truth is that on a number of pivotal issues, Joe Lieberman has so assiduously followed the private virtue of voting his conscience that he committed the public vice of defying the people of Connecticut. The voters of one of the bluest of blue states are overwhelmingly against the war in Iraq, and Joe Lieberman supports staying the course. In this context, the rare primary defeat of an incumbent senator is perfectly understandable.

When he vied to become Vice President Lieberman and even President Lieberman, Senator Lieberman tacked so far to the “electable” center that he lost touch with his constituents. Indeed, some members of the chattering class have hoisted Joe Lieberman as an exemplar for centrism and moderation; however, they fail to acknowledge that though he is a moderate by national standards, by the standards of Connecticut he is on the right wing. Despite his liberal record on some issues, Connecticut Democrats have not been able to forgive Senator Lieberman for trying to keep the feeding tube in Terri Schiavo’s neck and our troops in the hostile desert villages of Anbar province.

Even though the incumbent Senator has clashed with his constituents on a smorgasbord of issues from the Medicare prescription drug program to privatizing Social Security, nothing stands out more than his unequivocal support for the Iraq War. According to a Quinnipiac poll taken shortly after the Connecticut primary, 70 percent of all Connecticut voters – and 93 percent of all Connecticut Democrats – expressed disapproval of President Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq. Thus when the increasingly unpopular Commander in Chief planted a big wet one on Lieberman’s cheek before the last State of the Union address, it is no wonder that this kiss of death sealed the Senator’s fate before the Democratic electorate. Essentially, the political instability in Hartford and in Baghdad alike has been sown by the same untenable dynamic; the overwhelming majority of citizens of both polities want to end the American occupation of Iraq, but their public officials continue to defy the public will.

Not only has Joe Lieberman’s policy out of touch with Connecticut, but he as made a point of alienating his constituents as a matter of style. Lieberman’s speeches defending the debacle in Iraq and criticizing Democrats who criticize the President have been so enthusiastically received in Republican quarters that they have even been quoted by Bush himself to create a semblance of bipartisan consensus on his disastrous policy. In an editorial for the Wall Street Journal last November, Lieberman declared, “I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took American into the war in Iraq almost three years ago… than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead.” However, such persons concerned about the ill-fated rush to war constitute a plurality of Connecticut voters.

Though he lost the primary, Joe Lieberman has decided to stick it out in the general election as an independent candidate. As the official Republican nominee Alan Schlesinger has been dismissed as a sacrificial lamb, Lieberman has since become the de facto Republican candidate. Indeed, the GOP is the only constituency left in which there is still a modicum of support left for the quagmire in Iraq, and thus Republican organizational and fundraising networks have formed a vital part of Joe Lieberman’s general election campaign. If this race is to be seen as a referendum on changing course in Iraq, then apparently the only chance for Lieberman to keep his Senate seat is with support of a faction which disregards the sentiment of a clear majority of the American people.

The race in Connecticut is but a microcosm of the larger conflict in the American republic between a disillusioned nation which wants a change of course in Iraq and a government that values what it erroneously believes to be the pursuit of a just cause above the most basic principle of democracy: that vox populi est vox dei. Rare is the agent of governor who can violate his sacred compact with the governed and yet survive. That is why the Democrats of Connecticut have denied Joe Lieberman the privilege of serving under their banner in the United States Senate.

Howard Dean's Democratic Party

(January 2005)

“Give the people a choice between a Republican and a Republican and they will pick the Republican every time.”
- Harry Truman

In the aftermath of the 2004 elections, the consensus among the chattering classes was that John Kerry and his fellow Democrats fared so poorly as a result of their values - or rather their lack thereof. As though the values gap in comparison to the Republican Party was limited to their candidates’ perceived commitment to religious mores, the Democratic caucus in the Senate chose a pro-life, teetotaling Mormon in Harry Reid as their new figurehead, and sent House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi brandishing a Bible in front of the Washington press corps. These two embodiments of the party establishment decided that the best way to reverse their political decline was to deemphasize their dedication to the very principles which define the Democratic Party, and likewise endorsed Tim Roemer for the position of DNC Chairman - someone who as a Congressman from Indiana not only fought against abortion rights but also voted for the privatization of Social Security.

A lonely voice called foul, that of former Vermont governor Howard Dean, “That word—'values'—has lately become a codeword for appeasement of the right-wing fringe. But when political calculations make us soften our opposition to bigotry, or sign on to policies that add to the burden of ordinary Americans, we have abandoned our true values.”

When the post of chairman of the Democratic National Committee opened up, Dr. Dean saw a golden opportunity to personally do what he based his entire presidential campaign on: “taking back” the party to its progressive roots and transforming it into an effectual political organization. In his speech to the executive committee in January of 2003, Dean laid out his plan, “I want a party that stands unashamedly for equal rights for all Americans” and “I want a party that stands unashamedly for health care for every single American”, he declared, “I want a party that stands unashamedly for balanced budgets and taking care of poor kids and voting together and healing the divides instead of expressing the divides and exploiting them the way the Republican Party has so shamelessly done since 1968.” Howard Dean offered voters a choice, not an echo.

Predictably, the media consultants and strategists who fill up the highest ranks of the Democratic Party wet their pants with fear. In an eerily parallel repetition of the spasms that occurred when Dean became the frontrunner during the 2003-2004 primary races, his Lilliputian rivals teamed up to try to bring down what seemed once again to be a certain victory. The Kerry loyalists tried to entice Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to enter the race, and the Clinton loyalists tried to inject their man Wesley Clark , but both declined due to presidential aspirations in 2008. Ex-Representative Martin Frost, gerrymandered out of his House district, ran to remake the Democrats as the national security party. And the Congressional leaders did their best to pump life into Roemer’s hopeless effort, to no avail. However, unlike Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, his run for DNC chairman ended not in an ignominious scream but an outright victory.

So what does this mean? Has the Democratic Party given up on its populist roots and become the spokesperson for what New York Times columnist David Brooks labels the “the urban and university-town elite”? Has it given up all hope of ever again being a party that governs and morphed into a permanent protest organization? I would say that in choosing Dean as their new chairman, Democrats have shown that they finally realize that no one likes a politician who tries to be something that they are not; they have once and for all come out of the closet, so to speak. And it’s about time.

If the standard complaint about the Democratic Party’s deficiency in values is referring to individual Democrats’ personal piety, it can be brushed off as a superficial ad hominem attack. But the values issue actually has much truth if it is referring to the party’s running without dedication to any guiding principles, for ever since the Democratic Party became the party of Bill Clinton, it has essentially been running for the sole sake of winning. As a “New Democrat” who could triangulate between the ideologues on the right and the left, Clinton chose as his DNC chairs philosophical soul-mates like Ron Brown and Roy Romer, and the DNC bobbed along fecklessly in tandem with Clinton’s presidency, trying ever-so-earnestly to appeal to unaffiliated swing voters at the expense of the party’s base. From 1993 onward the party leadership has done its best to avoid taking a definitive stand on issues like war and peace, abortion and marriage – those issues which actually drive private citizens to engage in activism; in recent years, chairman Terry McAuliffe squandered the opportunity of having an unelected bully pulpit to bring attention to Democrats’ supporting drought relief for Great Plains farmers and questioning the legitimacy of petitions for Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign.

The current political makeup of this country testifies that centrism is an excellent platform for a single candidate to run for election, but a dreadful platform to define a political party; though Clinton was elected and re-elected four years later, under his chairmen’s reign, Democrats lost their majority of seats in both houses of Congress and their grip on statehouses nationwide. And the GOP’s current ascendancy would not be possible if it were not for Newt Gingrich’s rigidly ideological tenure as Speaker of the House; credit for the Republican sweep in the 1994 midterm elections is largely given to his reform-minded and self-righteous Contract with America, which spelled out a platform of fundamental values and an agenda for all of his colleagues to run on.

Now the Howard Dean/Newt Gingrich analogy is too tempting to resist. Not only have they both shaped their rhetoric with the language of reform, but they actually shared a number of the same proposals, from balancing budgets to strengthening ethics laws; of course, the only reason Dean can still run on part of Gingrich’s platform is that with more than a decade after the latter’s revolution, the federal budget is running up deficits and Congress’ ethical standards are in shambles.

The most widespread grievances against both of their respective modi operandi were that both men were so uncompromising that they could not work across party lines, and that their personalities were so anger-fueled that they turned off swing voters and members of the opposite party. But prickliness was no longer a problem for Gingrich once he shed his status as leader of the opposition party, for he did not have to make deals with Democrats in order to advance his agenda. And ideological purity was an asset if anything, for his electoral strategy was not to aim for moderates but to give conservatives and apolitical types receptive to a conservative message a reason to come out and vote. Howard Dean’s famously outspoken nature was one of the main reasons why people new to the world of politics came to work for his campaign in the first place; bipartisanship would have been an essential for the success of a Dean presidency, but a Dean chairmanship? By the nature of the job as head of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean now has no one to answer to but registered Democrats.

After all, the whole reason for political parties to exist in the first place is to organize likeminded activists in a particular movement. The Communist Party was made to further the march of Communism, the Prohibition Party was formed to enact Prohibition, and the Republican Party now serves to advance the aims of the conservative movement. Howard Dean is making the Democratic Party the electoral vehicle of the Progressive movement, as he is channeling the dedication and purpose from the current national campaigns for a fair economy, a stable environment, an end to the war in Iraq, reproductive rights, gay rights, under the Democratic tent.

Another one of the Democratic Party’s weaknesses has been its relative lack of a localized, bottom-up, grassroots organization in comparison to the GOP, which has such a thriving national machine that it is able to field candidates for almost every major public office. The spin-off organization from Dean for America, Democracy for America, has been successfully recruiting socially progressive, fiscally responsible candidates from school boards, county sheriff’s offices and public land commissions up to the current governor of Montana and junior senator from Colorado. The vast majority of these candidates were inspired to run for their own positions in government after making phone calls and stuffing envelopes for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.

First-year student Raj Borsellino explained to me that the new chairman of the DNC was uniquely inspirational, enough so to make him decide to defer matriculation to Amherst College so that he could spend a year working on his ground campaign for the Iowa caucuses. “When Howard Dean was still in the race for president, I had faith in the system. I had faith that my participation was actually going towards something meaningful.” Now he and countless other “Deaniacs”, many of whom had no prior involvement in Democratic politics, are transporting their faith in one man to faith in the Democratic Party.

If Democrats are ever again to be the dominant party in the United States, we have to capitalize on their appeal among young people, for if college students, working teenagers and twenty-somethings voted in the same proportion as Social Security beneficiaries, then the power structure of this country would be fundamentally less conservative than it is now. During the short-lived Dean for America campaign, the heft of the youth vote was seen at levels unseen since the days of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern, as a remarkable one quarter of all financial contributors were under 30 years old, and even activists who were years away from voting age or even earning their drivers’ licenses raised thousands of dollars worth of campaign funds on the Internet. By choosing Howard Dean as their new boss, the DNC is taking a long-term step in the right direction.