BooMan wonders why any progressive would support Hillary Clinton. Well, considering that I did endorse Hillary Clinton, I suppose I should be willing to step up and explain myself.
As I said …
… And while I’ve mostly been able to tune the candidates out, I haven’t been able to get away from the persistent annoyances of their attackers. OMFG, a millionaire lawyer who doesn’t go to Supercuts, even though he gives a damn about people who’ve seen the business end of a food stamp! Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, a multi-ethnic lawyer who went to a funny school in a foreign country and has a name that doesn’t just scream One White Guy! Holy Cannoli, Batman, a female lawyer who’s gotten high dollar campaign contributions from the lobbyists of the industries whose executives just give to her opponents directly!
Unfortunately for me, and for you if you’re not a Clinton fan, some of the most annoying critiques of Clinton come from the blogosphere. That, I can’t tune out, which is probably why they annoy me so much. Everyone notices the pebble in their own shoe. Alternately, there’s the rank sexism, though that mostly comes from the pundits.
So, because I’ve already included her in my blanket endorsement of whatever Democrat wins, and because it may give people like David Mizner and Chris Matthews screaming fits of high-pitched apoplexy, which will greatly comfort me when stupid Democratic policies are driving me up a wall; I hereby endorse Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. …
It was a choosing-against choice, come to it. Since I made that decision, I’ve felt ever more justified in it as regards Obama, wavered over Edwards, and at present feel just fine about it. I haven’t wanted to criticize the candidates too terribly much, believe me when I say I’ve exercised restraint, but I’m feeling better about that, too, these days. Particularly for the mostly inside baseball things that I don’t see hurting anyone in the general, because the media and the larger electorate never seem bothered to care about them.
BooMan’s main critique of Clinton, that she is not progressive, I will not contest. It’s a point unworthy of serious debate. Is Obama progressive? I think not. Is Edwards? It seems to be the case. More on that in a bit.
Is electability an issue for me? Piffle. I think all three of them are electable. Which is to say that given a competently executed campaign, it seems likely to me that a majority of voters would be willing to pull the lever for them.
Aside from policy, which as I explained in my endorsement, none of these candidates meets my bar for, what’s important to me? In a word, partisanship. In another, boldness. Only one candidate has demonstrated both qualities to my satisfaction.
When I say partisanship, it must be obvious that this criterion disqualified Obama almost at once, though I really tried to like him. Paul Krugman recently said it best in his argument for why progressives should abandon all thoughts of bipartisanship. It may admittedly have been premature to pronounce his candidacy dead in October on those grounds, but the more I’ve seen of his campaign, the less I’ve liked him. And the more I’ve heard his supporters whine about how everyone who doesn’t support him is a sell-out, with particular venom for the bloggers who formerly supported the very partisan Gov. Dean, my regard for his campaign has plummeted even further.
From conversations I’ve had in person with his supporters, I feel that Obama is directly responsible for lowering the political IQ of many Democrats and potential progressives. He’s given the whole damn party a Pulp Fictionesque adrenalin shot to the heart of Broderistic pap. Bi-frakking-partisanship. You know what bipartisanship means right now in this country? The real country that we actually live in, and not some post-postmodernist, nihilistic, asemantic, college bull session fantasy?
Bipartisanship means that at least some of the Democrats are trying to build a life raft, while the Republicans and the conservative Democrats are trying to build underwater mines: now you crazy kids go work together and see what you come up with.
I do understand why people might support Obama, he does have a lot else to recommend him. I’m not accusing people who do support him of not being real Democrats or progressives. He’s just not my first choice and barely my fifth. (Fifth? Yeah. Neither of my first two choices are running. Vote in the primary ‘with my heart’? Not possible.)
Then, there’s boldness. I like Edwards’ policies a lot, as I mentioned. But he has never erased my disappointment in him over his performance in the VP debate with Cheney in 2004 after all the hype about his great skills as a closer in the courtroom. Cheney wiped the floor with him. Cheney. One of America’s most anti-charismatic, dodgy, creepy and unlikeable political figures. It’s like losing a debate to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Corrupt Bastards Club). How does something like that even happen?
It would be fair to say that the debate was three years ago, and Edwards has been through a lot since then. People grow. It’s true, they can. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, I’m a different person than I was three years ago, and thank goodness. Means I haven’t embalmed myself alive yet, is what.
Then, Edwards hired a couple of bloggers. And not just a couple people to blog, but a couple people who became known for blogging out on their own in the big, scary Intertubes. Big score for boldness. And for bloggers. Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan being wicked cool, to boot, bigger score. And so I thought, ‘Damn, he must have one impressive defense ready for when they get attacked over that.’
Silly me.
As became obvious when the Edwards campaign was inevitably attacked over that, they acted as though no one could possibly have predicted that this would happen. I mean, who’d have guessed that hiring irreverent, outspoken feminists who’ve written thousands upon thousands of words about their irreverent feminism would have said things in the past that some utterly insane fundamentalist whackjob would take public issue with in a way that would instantly capture the attention of every Faux News hack and wanna-be in the continental United States? Who could have seen that coming? Like, besides anyone with a pulse.
And then he really blinked, waiting days to put out a tepid defense and apology. Did the campaign challenge Donohue’s moral authority on the basis of his being an anti-gay, antisemitic bigot who isn’t even a semi-official representative of the Catholic church? No. Did they send out a bold, public call for those attacking the bloggers to denounce the people making death and rape threats against them and stalking them at their homes? No. Did they punt and leave Donohue roaming free and unwounded, to fight again another day? You betcha.
Guess what I think of Edwards’ ability to really walk through the fire for me or my issues.
The Edwards campaign also announced that they’d be running on public financing in the general, again repeating the mistake of the 2004 presidential campaign. If he doesn’t have money for ads between the primaries and the convention, given the media narrative handling skills I observed during the blogger fiasco, how’s he going to defend himself against the inevitable attacks? If he wins, how is he going to handle even the Bush dogs?
It isn’t enough in presidential politics to believe the right things, unfortunately. Then when they’re only mostly the right things and you’ve not demonstrated to me that you’ll defend them well, my support won’t be a given.
By elimination, there’s Clinton.
The lobbyist thing is a non-issue for me, though Edwards’ recent, and better placed, identification of corporate power as the problem is attractive. I don’t like her hawkishness on Iran, though I think she’s realistic and sensible enough that the recent NIE will be enough to keep her future policy towards that country on an even keel. Her energy policy is all right, though I worry about her on agriculture. For women’s rights and education, she’ll be as good as any and better than most. She defended the liberal blogs and the DailyKos community before YearlyKos when Bill O’Reilly tried demonizing us all, so while she’s no big blog booster and knows she isn’t popular in this set, she didn’t kick us to the curb for easy points. She doesn’t attack liberals from the right, as far as I can tell. And she won’t pretend to us to be something she isn’t, even if there are questions she doesn’t want to answer, because I think we all know why that is.
Clinton has already had to stand the heat of national politics. That’s also not something that I think is up for reasonable debate. I think she’s made some wrong decisions, but she’s not a pushover and she’s not a backstabber. She’s smart and tough and won a lot more people over than the pessimists thought she could.
She has character, vigor, and a spine, and the few occasions when I’ve been in the same room with her, though I’ve never so much as shaken her hand, I had a good impression of her as a person.
So yeah, I would consider myself a progressive who stands by an endorsement of Clinton. At the same time, the work ahead of progressives to fill Congress with better Democrats, to reform the media, to awaken civil society and arouse the political capital to solve the planetary emergency of climate change, is a task of huge proportions. It’s the job of everyone who cares about these issues to think about how to generate a public outcry so great that new political realities will emerge in which public servants have room to do things that seem crazy now. Like passing and signing laws against opening new coal-fired power plants, which not even Al Gore himself would be able to get past this Congress.
I’m not afraid of Hillary Clinton, or any of the other Democrats. My only real fear is that enough people might not be shaken out of apathy. That we will spend so much time looking up at the politicians that we won’t look around at how to build our communities into forces for positive, collective action. Again, and again, and again, no one is coming to save us from on high. No one.
How much do you want to win? After the dust of the primaries settles, that question will remain with us. The challenges we face are too much for one person. Or for 535 people who are constantly having to beg for more money in a year than you or I are ever likely to earn. We have a planetary emergency to solve, and it’s going to require the shared help of everyone who cares about what happens more than 10 years from now, even if every member of Congress and the president besides woke up one morning and took James Hansen seriously.
My only request of any progressive is this: don’t be afraid of the wrong things. There isn’t time.
Hillary’s foreign policy re. the Middle East is essentially Israel’s foreign policy. These policies essentially dictate our relations to most Arab countries in the Middle East including Iran, and merely continues Bush foreign policy.
Where is the discussion about the 40 year military occupation of the Palestinians, the colonization of their lands, failure of Israel to comply with UN Resolutions and international law, Palestinian statehood, etc. Instead, we find her that her agenda just repeats Israeli propaganda, e.g., that fighters of the occupation are terrorists. With Hillary we could be in for another eight years of the same, i.e., whatever Israel dictates. Small wonder she (and Bill) had no compunctions with greeting Adigdor Lieberman, Israel’s most notorious racist, who subscribes to the idea that Israeli Arabs should be “transferred” out of Israel, at the Saban Institute last December.
We need to take our country back and we need to begin supporting with our own principles concerning democracy, freedom, and self-determination for all peoples.
you exaggerate.
But, remember…
Clinton’s first DCI was James Woolsey.
Sorry that I didn’t link this published agenda, which is a wider middle east agenda if you look closely, one dictated by Israel.
And that is why I prefer to see the centrists from the DLC as the DLC/AIPAC centrists.
why do use AIPAC as shorthand for everything? Isn’t JINSA just as important? It bothers me that you use AIPAC as a catch-all for what is actually a much larger and more influential organization.
You’re not incorrect. One might just refer to the “Israel Lobby” a la Mearscheimer and Walt instead. But AIPAC is still the most active proIsrael lobby group in DC, and as such it is a symbol of Israel’s influence on Congress. Everyone who reads AIPAC knows what is meant.
You expect something else out of a US politician in our current state of affairs?
The short answer is yes. Are our presidential candidates now to be picked by a foreign government. Didn’t we just pull that shit on the Palestinians?
This really doesn’t help me understand at all.
Hillary isn’t partisan at all. She’s almost a stand-in for David Broder as a politician.
Her foreign policy is basically the same as Joe Lieberman’s, just nuanced to sound acceptable to some on the left. The Clintons are as dedicated to a forward-basing strategy in the ME and central Asia as any neo-conservative (they did, after all, implement the strategy).
She isn’t notably against the concept of the War on Terror at all, and has not led on torture, Guantanamo, habeas corpus, warrantless wiretapping, or any other abuses related to our response to 9/11.
She isn’t pushing any domestic policy that isn’t obvious, and her solutions would be better as compromise solutions than goals.
Her advocates are the most hostile critics of the anti-war movement, progressives, and the blogosphere out there, and she will assign them all to the positions of power within the party. Say goodbye to having an ally at the DNC.
Meanwhile, if she has some excuse for running as a hawkish moderate (because she is a woman, and has been demonized as too liberal), Obama has the same excuse. He would quickly fade if he were to take up the banner of black identity politics, or if he were to be an angry campaigner (because of White fear) and he would freak the Establishment out if he tried half the anti-corporate rhetoric of Edwards.
His road to the nomination is largely dictated by these outside strictures. It isn’t enough to declare that he isn’t a progressive and move on. Everything about his life screams progressive, but he cannot run as one. Yet, he isn’t running as a centrist on policy so much as on tone.
And, are you seriously rejecting Edwards over his debate performance and handling of bloggergate?
Didn’t you say that we have more important stuff to worry about?
I still don’t get it. The Clintons’ created the foreign policy milieu that got us into this mess, and the idiotic moral decisions that gave us George W. Bush. And the best we can do after seeing the result is to give them another chance?
That’s crazy.
Are you really happy with any of them?
Obama’s life might scream progressive, but he hasn’t voted as one. And no one threatened him and made him pick McClurkin to MC that gospel show, or made him diss the blogs, or made him bring up the Social Security scare again, or made him attack Krugman. He uses right wing frames and attacks progressives. He doesn’t have to in order to avoid freaking out the establishment, he could just leave well enough alone. That’s my problem with him. He shoots the people who are going to have to be the allies of any Democratic candidate/president in the foot.
And yes, I do hold those mistakes against Edwards. They sit wrong with me. They’re the kinds of mistakes that can cost an election, which I say because they’re the same kinds of lapses in campaign judgment that cost Kerry the 2004 election.
I didn’t expect to convince you, or anyone else. I’m also not claiming that my reasons for picking a candidate are objectively the best, or the only criteria on which a progressive should decide, they’re just mine.
If you want the appearance of partisanship than Hilary is indeed the candidate of choice. With her you get that middle of the road politics of High Broderism and the credibility to the middle of America of Michael Moore. If you want stark partisan positions I would go with Edwards, if you want stark partisan bitterness then I would go with Clinton.
Obama is my candidate of choice for a number of reasons including his rather progressive position on the Iraq war in 2002 and his very progressive record on campaign finance reform. I do not believe that Obama is what passes for bipartisan in this hyper-partisan era. I think he is what would pass for partisan in a less partisan era. With him leading our country and our party we have a chance at bringing more of our citizens together behind the person and the politics of our president.
actually, i have the opposite impression of obama as you do. i remember him when he was an illinois state senator and i was living in chicago. his voting record was quite progressive in the state house, and he clearly has a much more progressive voting record in the senate than clinton.
his big problem is rhetoric, like his evocation of a “social security crisis”, but that’s not his voting record, it’s his rhetorical stance he has taken in the campaign. and, rhetorically speaking, i don’t think clinton’s rhetoric is any better. actually, on foreign policy, which is my big issue, obama’s campaign speeches are much much better than clinton’s.
even looking at the things you’re focusing on, i think obama is quite clearly better than clinton.
And Dean was largely a moderate, who nonetheless created rhetorical space for being liberal again, while Lieberman is mostly a liberal who destroys the credibility of liberal politics with his ponderous whining.
What they say about the people who share their politics matters. Their tone matters. How they treat the other members of their coalition, of the coalition they have to have just to keep their base together, matters.
He wants to reach out to Republicans, but will happily slap Democrats, progressives, gays and the netroots. That tells me that he thinks some hypothetical conservatives are more the people he’d consider as potential allies than we are, that he’s more interested in not running afoul of what they think than what someone like me thinks, and I distrust him on that basis.
I hope you’re right about him, though.
What they say about the people who share their politics matters. Their tone matters. How they treat the other members of their coalition, of the coalition they have to have just to keep their base together, matters
oh, i agree with that. that’s why i am concerned about obama’s rhetoric on the campaign trail. but in terms of substantive policy and/or judgment, i think he’s clearly better than clinton. clinton’s hawkish votes about iran are simply inexcusable, and it undercuts any claim that she has learned her lesson after voting for the AUMF in iraq. as is clinton’s criticism of obama for saying that we should talk directly with iran. that’s an instance where clinton adopted rightwing talking points, and turned against progressives in the same way obama did with social security.
Thanks Natasha for explaining your thought process. I can’t support Hillary in the primary but will if she’s the candidate.
I was just saying on another blog this morning that it makes a lot of sense to me that rational voters follow the rational choice model only up to a point and then rely on instinct or intuition on the things that can’t really be measured. Like this:
I actually have the same instinct about Hillary but I don’t want a return to the Clinton years of media hatred, I’d like to break the cycle of “family” presidencies and and I’d like to support someone with a more progressive agenda who actually has the wherewithal to accomplish it.
I’m not sure that person exists – certainly neither Obama nor Edwards has convinced me that either of them have both of those last qualities. But the first two factors for me eliminate Hillary.
Truthfully, when February 5 rolls around I suspect I will be voting for the person best able to defeat Hillary. Which again is a vote by process of elimination.
But thanks for the thought process. It was interesting to see it.
I understand your meta arguments about the media and so forth, that’s pretty much why I think the important work is in Congress and the public sphere, and generally, getting a Democrat in the presidency.
It’s back to the need for the 50-state, take back the party theme. It’d be nice to have a political backdrop in which progressives had a feast of presidential candidates, but that day is a bit on down the road, imo.
And I’m glad to know we’ll be comfortably standing on the same side after the primary 🙂
Hillary isn’t likely to do anything to change the dynamic in the media. She takes money from Rupert Murdoch and it was the 1996 telecommunications bill that created the right wing bias in the first place.
http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0geu8pQIXRHi3YAYxlXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTFiMzhqb2Q0BHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMQRjb2xvA2Fj
MgR2dGlkA01BUDAxNF8xMTAEbANXUzE-SIG=12ol4e3su/EXP=1198879440**http%3a//www.cbsnews.com/stories/200
6/05/09/politics/main1600694.shtml
She doesn’t change any structures that cause right wing domination of American politics.
And by ‘we’, I mean the public and not strictly the blogosphere.
The citizens of this country need to insist on something different because none of the politicians can change this. None of them will. We do it or it doesn’t happen.
That makes no sense. If the public could change it, why haven’t they done it already?
In a representative democracy we have to elect people who will.
Just look what happened to the netroots freshman class everyone was so excited about. Did they change everything? Not so much. We’ve got a system that it’s devilish hard to change from the inside.
And the public might not ever demand any sort of change. No one might ever do so. There’s no historical imperative that says anything at all, ever again, needs to get better. We could be standing on the brink of another Dark Ages, who knows?
Though if it were to get better, people who aren’t beholden to our desperately screwed up political system are far freer to act as agents of change.
vote for corruption because of corruption. Not a sound endorsement in my view.
Correcting the political system is going to be like debugging a computer program: Fixing one thing often reveals another flaw that the scope of the first flaw had rather obscured, and being foresightful about this, a person can generally predict that there will be another flaw waiting behind that one. Human created systems being what they are, this assumption is rarely wrong.
We have more Democrats, as of 2006. Now what? Happens to be that this wasn’t the whole of the problem. The elected officials are the public faces of staffs, donors and friends they’ve accumulated, whose very constrained time and tight schedules leaves them somewhat at the mercy of those they’ve come to rely on to know more things than any one person can know and remember. The opinion network represented by these people’s interactions, grievances, shared beliefs, assumptions and so forth, is also significantly affected by a corrupt media on whom they rely to see themselves in a mirror and look out at the world, knowing as they do that the media lens is the only one the majority of the public will ever see them through. Then there are the lobbyists, who know impossible numbers of things about very narrow subjects and often represent the extremely corrupt people who actually make things happen back in home states/districts and have influence over the opinion networks that apportion power on the ground, as it were.
It’s a problem that will resist solving, to take another mechanistic metaphor, for so long as the plan is to replace broken gears with new gears. The way the gears are aligned must be changed, so that they’ll stop breaking so often.
…and although Senator Clinton is not my first choice philosophically or politically, I can see your point. With Pakistan going to $%^&* in a handbasket (Don’t be surprised to see India arming up in the next few days!) Americans are not going to bet on the kid genius, Obama. I do believe we’ll have a real, honest recession by next year. But Americans may think that Clinton’s business-oriented stance has more chance of pulling us out of it than Edwards’ “bring everyone out of it together” stance. (Not that it’s true, but they’ve drunk the kool-aid to some extent.)
Without a Democratic President, we get a 6-3 or 7-2 Supreme Court, folks. The Chamber of Commerce folks aren’t afraid of Clinton, and she won’t appoint a Scalia. While I think they broke the mold, she’ll look for another Ruth Guinsberg. So those of us who want a real progressive may have to settle for baby steps.
Natasha,
I’m really curious about your endorsement of Hillary Clinton. You are one of the more knowledgeable people around here when it comes to labor issues. Does it not trouble you that one of her chief advisors, Mark Penn, is an executive at a firm that engages in union busting? What about the issue of trade agreements? I’ve seen nothing from Hillary that shows me she would be at all progressive on this issue.
Yes, it does trouble me. It bugs me inordinately. I wish I’d remembered to mention it in the post. (Though I don’t feel like I know as much about labor issues as you say. Thanks for the compliment.)
But when I was watching the votes for the House Farm Bill, even the most irritating of the Bush Dog Democrats on that committee held the line for Davis-Bacon. That’s when I saw that wrt unions, there are certain behavioral lines that Dems in DC will not cross.
And I’d return to saying that the real work in that arena is for us to make the case to the public that unions are important. For the unions to organize more people. For bloggers and media to take a sharper look at union-busting when it occurs. That work needs to be done outside of DC so that the politicians can throw up their hands and say, ‘hey, don’t look at me, this is what the people want.’
There are a myriad of ways in which these people aren’t leaders. I don’t think we can change that in any reasonable span of time. It’s going to be hard as hell, but it seems the better and ultimately more likely route to build a parade large enough that they can’t resist getting in front of it.
Thanks for your thoughts. And thanks for your work in this area.
I can’t say you’ve won me over to Hillary, but I do appreciate your response.
Off topic: on my computer the comment on this diary runs into the advertisements in the right-hand margin. Is there a way to correct this problem? Or is my computer at fault? This has happened before. Also at EuroTrib.
Not anything you can do about it on your end.
This happens when someone inserts a link in their comments which is so long that it spans beyond the width of the space allowed for comments. It does not wrap around and as a result it “breaks the thread”.
In this case it happened as result of the link in StrayRoots post at 5:04 PST.
To avoid this problem links really should be provided using the HTML function [A HREF]. But not everyone who comments on blogs is familiar with the HTML functions which can be used while commenting. It happens a lot but it can be avoided.
For the newer users here, you can also insert links into your post like this:
and it comes out like this:
It’s much friendlier than spelling out the whole URL, since you get an idea of what’s behind the link. Nicer-looking, too.
I appreciate you sharing your reasons for Clinton, but for me–no, and hell no. It’s Barack Obama, all the way for me!
I am not interested in the Clinton Restoration and its ethos of poll-driven, cotton candy initiatives. Do you remember any? School uniforms, perhaps?
In fact, she’s more right wing than Bill, and his administration, while doing a few things right, lived for triangulating and cutting deals with rethugs. I remember those days well. As someone mentioned before in another discussion a while back, I truly believe that she wouldn’t end this war, to show that she’s tougher than both her husband AND the pampered shrub. And don’t mention NAFTA and other trade related issues.
(((Groan)))
That’s something Edwards voted the right way on, btw…but that’s about it. He’s saying the right thing–now. I needed him to do the right thing then, while he was there in the Senate.
Biden? Well, he makes me laugh, but he runs his mouth too much.
Kucinich? I was more than a bit put off that he was anointed as the “progressive savior” (good on Katha Pollit to make him fully progressive) and I was really put off that he was jealous of Dean’s initial success in the ’04 primary because the war was supposed to be “his” issue. God, I remember how green-eyed he seemed. Not a good look.
Richardson? He’s smart, but I don’t trust him for some reason. Maybe because it seems like he’s running to be Clinton’s veep. Next.
I actually like Dodd and would have at least considered him if there was no Barack Obama. But there is a Barack Obama, and I can’t wait to cast my vote for him!
I am sick to death of voting against republicans. I’ve been doing so for 15 years.
I am voting for intelligence. I am voting for JUDGMENT. I am voting for vision. And yes, I’m even voting for hope and inspiration!
I am voting FOR Barack Obama!
You are to be admired for having the guts to come out and tell us why you are for Hillary. I have a friend who I respect (like you) and who is very intelligent (like you) and is a very seasoned political hand and former Dean adviser who is pro-Hillary (like you). I can’t bring myself to ask how the hell she can support Hillary because we are both strongly support our favorite (I post @ http://www.seattleforbarackobama.com) and don’t want to argue with her. So you have helped me to understand (a little) how it is. Thanks–you have always seemed like someone who is not afraid to reach your own conclusions and isn’t an asshole about it, either.
It’s very good of you to say and I appreciate it.
Even though you totally picked the wrong candidate ;D