Jim Clyburn is an 8-term Democrat from South Carolina’s 6th District, centered in Columbia. He’s also the Majority Whip, which was Tom DeLay’s old job before Gingrich got the boot. He’s a lot more low-key than The Hammer, so you might not be too familiar with him.
But Clyburn is familiar with the opinions of the Democratic Caucus and I don’t like what he’s saying.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said Monday that a strongly positive report on progress on Iraq by Army Gen. David Petraeus likely would split Democrats in the House and impede his party’s efforts to press for a timetable to end the war.
Clyburn, in an interview with the washingtonpost.com video program PostTalk, said Democrats might be wise to wait for the Petraeus report, scheduled to be delivered in September, before charting next steps in their year-long struggle with President Bush over the direction of U.S. strategy.
Clyburn noted that Petraeus carries significant weight among the 47 members of the Blue Dog caucus in the House, a group of moderate to conservative Democrats. Without their support, he said, Democratic leaders would find it virtually impossible to pass legislation setting a timetable for withdrawal.
“I think there would be enough support in that group to want to stay the course and if the Republicans were to stay united as they have been, then it would be a problem for us,” Clyburn said. “We, by and large, would be wise to wait on the report.”
Many Democrats have anticipated that, at best, Petraeus and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker would present a mixed analysis of the success of the current troop surge strategy, given continued violence in Baghdad. But of late there have been signs that the commander of U.S. forces might be preparing something more generally positive. Clyburn said that would be “a real big problem for us.”
I never like to criticize a politician for being honest, but Clyburn needs to work on his framing. Telling people that a good progress report from Iraq will be ‘a real big problem for us’ is not the best way of making the point. The point is that a positive progress report will not change the underlying hopelessness of our mission in Iraq, but it may be enough to splinter the Democratic Caucus. And, if that happens, the Dems’ problem will be with their own base. Again, I’ve got no problem with honesty. Clyburn is probably right.
And it doesn’t help that the Brookings Institute is already carrying water for an overly optimistic September report.
This fight is far from over. And Clyburn needs to work on his messaging.
I guess that being an Uncle Tom hasn’t gone out of style in Washington, DC.
It is by now obvious to everyone that staying in Iraq is nothing but avoiding (or rather putting off) a retrenchment of the American empire.
I’m sorry, but I can’t understand how a black person can be invested in America’s empire. How is America’s sense that it has a right to impose its will on the people of the Middle East any different than its earlier sense that it had the right to treat Africans as the property of white people, as opposed to as people in their own right?
If the US has a just cause to be in Iraq, then slavery was a noble institution.
I think your comment is totally out of line. Clyburn may be tone-deaf but he isn’t doin anything but reading the caucus. And he’s done nothing worthy of calling him an Uncle Tom.
I think you should do a little research on his background before you go spouting off about his principles.
So you mean to deny that there is any connection between America’s slaveholding past and its current neocolonial policy in the Middle East?
I don’t know anything about Clyburn, but I don’t need to for the point that I was making. I might be tone-deaf myself, but I don’t see how at this point anyone can resist a complete withdrawal from Iraq without knowing that what he or she is doing by so resisting is embracing Empire, the idea that America has a right to rule the world. And I don’t see how a black person can do that consistently without conceding that maybe slavery wasn’t such a bad idea at the time after all.
If you want to argue that there isn’t a racist component to American imperialism, be my guest.
Clyburn is the Majority Whip. Do you understand what that job entails?
He’s warning his own leadership and also warning us.
You jump from that to the theory that he has sold out his race?
Sorry. I read the post quickly, so I got the impression that Clyburn was sympathetic to the Blue Dogs, as opposed to issuing a warning about them. You are right that the “Uncle Tom” remark was out of line.
Still, there is some validity to my basic point. Clyburn adheres to the paradigm that the way to end the war is “to pass legislation setting a timetable for withdrawal”. This assumes that Democrats owe Republicans something, because the war could be ended without any Republican participation, simply by not passing any (war funding) legislation at all. The Blue Dogs wouldn’t come into the picture.
The occupation of Iraq is an absolute evil, like the American institution of slavery. Therefore, I think that it is a grave strategic error, and a significant moral failing, for opponents of the war to give its supporters the time of day.
It is time for Democrats to do what the Republicans have done under Bush: rule the country from their base, without giving the opposition a seat at the table at all. That is what all progressives are yearning for. And yes, I think blacks should be more open to this possibility, given their direct experience that the idea that America has a unified polity based on voluntary consensus is a myth.
.
I don’t understand your comments here to BooMan’s topic. Slavery has always been part of ‘civilization’, colonialism and empire building.
● Moshe and Egypt
● Islam, Arabs and Slavery
● Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in 17th Century
● Migrant ‘workers’ in Gulf States
As a result of an occupation (Iraq into 5th year) the US does subjugate a people. If that is the point you are making, losing one’s freedom due to war, it is quite different from historic principles of slavery.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I don’t understand your point about the US subjugating “a people” being “quite different from historic principles of slavery”. Do you deny that a parallel exists between subjugating a people domestically through the institution of slavery and subjugating a people externally through war and occupation? I know that slavery has always been part of civilization, but the United States is the only modern country that I am aware of that was built on slavery, for which slavery was an essential part of the economy.
It is remarkable how the US has been able to present itself as the beacon of civilization and democracy while having institutionalized slavery much more thoroughly than any European country ever did. (And European countries such as the German states that did not acquire colonies until quite late in the game never had slaves at all, as far as I am aware.) Now that we see America rejecting virtually all values of modernity under the Bush administration, I think it is quite appropriate to bring up America’s slaveholding past. I think it is very naive to think that one can understand America without taking into account the role that slavery has played in its very recent past, by European standards. One could say that the Civil War was America’s Thirty Years’ War. Unfortunately, in America, both sides did not embrace essentially the same values after the conflict, as one saw in Europe with the Treaty of Westphalia. Thus, today one speaks of the Blue States and the Red States.
The President famously asked the President of Brazil if they had black people there.
Regardless, your picture of slavery is highly distorted. The percentage of captured Africans that wound up as slaves in America is somewhere between 3%-10%. The vast majority wound up in the Caribbean or Latin America (especially Brazil).
That isn’t an excuse or apology for slavery in America, it’s just to balance out your assertion. And this still has nothing to do with Clyburn counting votes and telling us what he found.
Fine. Good points. But then nobody holds up Brazil as a beacon of democracy.
I try to salvage something from my original comment in my previous post. I guess that what I am trying to say is what I think a lot of people are feeling: that the time for politics as usual is over. And Clyburn, like most Dems, evidently doesn’t realize that.
Where his being black comes into the picture is that my impression is that black members of Congress, such as Cynthia McKinney, have tended to be better at injecting morality into politics than whites.
Well, the whole point of my post was that Clyburn was sloppy in what he said. But, his job is to tell Pelosi how many votes she has for any bill or strategy. And all he is doing is sharing what he has discovered with the public. It’s basically a neutral statement. But, he’s warning her (and us) that the votes to put in hard timelines are squishy. And, if they don’t have the votes they might not want to act like they do.
Yes, Clyburn’s remarks can be taken in a positive light, as pointing out that Pelosi’s strategy isn’t going to lead anywhere, which certainly seems to be the case. But your original point in your diary about the framing issue still stands.
This is all getting very frustrating. But then getting out of Vietnam was a long and frustrating process, to put it mildly. It is so frustrating that our politicians are putting achieving consensus over saving lives.
But then, to get back to basics, in my view this seeking consensus, this seeking “enough votes”, is just political theater, since a consensus on a larger issue does exist: that America’s empire must be maintained, and each expansion of it must be held. And that is worth sacrificing American lives. I think that that is the fundamental point on which our leaders differ from the majority of Americans, whether Democrat or Republican. I don’t think that even most Republicans think empire is worth shedding American blood. That is why the Bushies have to constantly talk up the War on Terror. And why Bush wouldn’t answer Cindy Sheehan’s question about what her son died for.
The Blue Dog Democrats are determined that Democrats lose the 2008 election.
Clyburn better worry about the progressives that might sit on their hands or vote for third party candidates.
And he might better realize that a good Petraeus report will be at base a lie.
Actually, most Blue Dogs come from districts that would otherwise elect Republicans comfortably. Much the same way that Republicans were grateful for whatever they could get out of Lincoln Chaffe, we out to keep the same perspective on the Blue Dogs – that is the true nature of tolerance (not to mention pragmatic politics in the real world).
The political landscape is changing and there are more Blue Dog districts that would now elect a more traditional Democrats than Republicans from the current Republican Party.
No, it’s not very tactful of him to say anything in public like this at this point. Even worse: nor is it tactical. The statement is very unfortunate. On the other hand, he may be sending out a warning about how the wind is starting to blow, more in the direction of Georgie Porgie and David. It’s almost as if he is saying that if David beefs up his report enough, we’ll be willing to go along with him, the relation of the report to any reality in Iraq is irrelevant. I don’t see that the Democratic congress, as a whole, is deeply committed to an incisive change of policy in Iraq. One way or the other, they seem to find a way to go along with things without going along with them. Is there any talk about what a newly elected Democratic president would do about Iraq 18 months from now? There should be, because the U.S. is still going to be stuck there while the former president Bush, Jr., sits in Paraguay pointing his finger and blaming the Democrats for messing up his glorious war: within weeks history will have vindicated him.
Alexander,
And about history, you can’t judge anyone by their skin color. Curious remark on my part. African-Americans are just as much Americans as European-Americans (I’ve never heard that term before), by which I mean that, as a group, the people of the U.S. share common prejudices (black people too!), concerns, preoccupations and obsessions. Especially the last. And their main obsession is America. Nevertheless I sort of get the drift of your comment, though it is a bit off topic. Clyburn is a powerful man and what he says and does now, this moment, today is the issue. His antecedents and historical take on slavery, which his ancestors almost certainly experienced FIRST HAND, are irrelevant to the solution of the Iraq horror. Right now, we need a solution, not a moralizing history lesson. I can already see Georgie sitting on the veranda of his huge hacienda reading from a book to a group of ex-patriot schoolchildren in Paraguay: ‘MY Victorious Iraq’.
so, once again, “our leaders” are warning us to go slow or we will find ourselves losing the pr wars. Ya know what?- we lost that war. over the past 6 or 7 years, how many folks have a clue as to how much effort the dems have put into trying to support the citizenry of this once great country? Stop the crap! The goopers own the media and until and unless the dems are willing to go to the barricades there aint a chance in hell of them getting a fair shake in the media.
As far as the “blue dogs” are concerned, isn’t it about time to simply put it to the public? Fish or cut bait! The party stand for certain things and if the dogs can’t support these positions the they shout see what they can get from the other folks. Prostitutes charge for services and these blue ballers should post their coste for all to see, then spread their legs and take what they get. I say to hell with them. if you keep playing in the garbage then eventually you can’t get rid of the stink!
Representative Clyburn’s voting record on military issues can be found at: Representative Clyburn’s Voting Record
Representative Clyburn’s history of speeches on Iraq can be found at: Representative Clyburn’s Record of Speeches
Representative Clyburn’s ratings from special interest groups on military issues can be found at: Representative Clyburn’s Interest Group Ratings
For more information on Representative Clyburn’s position on the war in Iraq please visit Project Vote Smart or call our hotline at 1-888-VOTE-SMART.