I’m the first to admit that different people make political decisions for different reasons. Everyone has a different set of life experiences and issues that are important to them. I have my own way of looking at presidential candidates, and it is not going to be shared by everyone. It’s not even going to be understood by everyone. But, I can try to explain it.
There’s a reason that (other than the vote to authorize the war) you’ll almost never hear me say that I support or oppose a candidate because of their position on the issues. But before we get to that, let me talk about a couple of issues that do matter to me. Kucinich voted against the war, Obama spoke out against the war, and Gravel didn’t support it. The rest of the candidates voted for it. As my friend Chris says, ‘I wouldn’t let anyone that voted to authorize the war use my bathroom. I couldn’t trust them not to shit in the sink.” At the very least, the sink-shitters should have long ago apologized and started helping to clean up the mess they created. On that score, Dodd and Edwards passed the test. Biden and Clinton? Not so much. Biden and Clinton earned no redemption points with me when they both failed to vote against the Bankruptcy Bill. Biden voted for it, while Clinton failed to vote. So issues do matter to me.
But most of the issues that matter to me are either mainstream Democratic issues that all serious candidates for the Democratic nomination know to support or they are so out of the mainstream that all serious candidates know better than to publicly embrace. For example, I want single payer health coverage for every American. I have no ideological interest in the health care plans being put forward by Edwards, Clinton, or Obama, and I could give two shits about the minor distinctions between them. When I see someone like Paul Krugman get all worked up about mandates to make every American purchase health insurance from a giant health insurance corporation, I think Paul Krugman is a complete pinhead asshole. The idea that someone would throw a temper tantrum over someone’s campaign proposal for a shitty (and bound to be profoundly unpopular) boon to the insurance corporations…a policy masquerading as progressive policy…is enough for me to put a fist through a Princeton professor’s office wall. But I recognize that if you have dedicated the last decade of your life, under Republican congressional rule, desperately trying to cobble together a lukewarm pro-corporate health care plan that might pass through Tom DeLay’s House, you might just get upset if people don’t leap for joy at your plan to force every American, no matter how poor, to become a customer of some giant HMO provider.
Issues matter, but you can’t tell much about a candidate by what they say about issues. Al Gore and Dennis Kucinich were avid pro-lifers until they decided to run for the Democratic nomination. George Poppy Bush dropped his pro-choice stance as a condition of becoming the Gipper’s vice-president. I have no use for such people. Reproductive rights aren’t the same as free trade agreements. You don’t just change your mind whenever it becomes convenient.
There’s no better proof that a candidate’s rhetoric cannot be trusted than George W. Bush’s promises to have a humble foreign policy, be a fiscal conservative, and govern as a uniter-not-a-divider. If you listened to what Bush was saying you would have been deceived. It you looked at what Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld had been saying, you would have known that regime change was coming to Iraq just as soon as a pretext could be found to justify it.
This is the way I judge the candidacies of the major presidential candidates. Hillary Clinton has crafted a fairly straightforward Democratic agenda…tepid, but not DLC-tepid. Obama’s policy papers are much the same. It’s all tentative stuff designed to please the base without making the suits nervous. Its lack of ambition isn’t a problem for me. It’s not a problem because I don’t take their position papers seriously. If they have to deal with Republican filibusters they’ll do one thing. If they don’t have to deal with Republican filibusters they’ll do another, more ambitious thing. Their policies are designed for a gridlocked environment. No gridlock? No reason to serve us oatmeal. In other words, this contest has become a personality test. That’s the wrong way to judge it.
The right way to judge it is by the company these campaigns keep. If you like their foreign policy advisers then trust them to do the right thing. If you don’t like their foreign policy advisers, then don’t.
The Clintons’ foreign policy team is atrocious. And that tells me what I need to know. It tells me a lot that James Carville and Paul Begala want to throw Howard Dean out at the DNC and replace him with DLC chairman Harold Ford Jr. It tells me a lot that the Clintons’ surrogates use nasty campaign tactics.
I could go on at great length about my problems with the Clintons and their gang over the years, but the real point is that Hillary Clinton isn’t one person that we might choose to vote for over some other person. Hillary Clinton is at the center of a movement within the Democratic Party. She has studiously distanced herself from the DLC policy shop, but DLC people have all endorsed Clinton. People like Terry McAuliffe are still the face of her campaign. Mark Penn is her campaign manager. These are the people that are going to win if Hillary wins. While some people celebrate the novelty of having our first female president, the government and the party apparatuses will be staffed with DLC corporate hacks and wannabes.
How is Obama different? He’s playing much of the same game from the other side. His positions are always calibrated to please the base without making the suits nervous. His policies don’t mean anything either. But he has a much, much different crowd, different life experiences, different grudges, different allies, different scores to settle. And the bottom line is that his Gang is a gang I can live with. My opposition to Clinton has very little to do with Hillary Clinton by herself.
Having said that, I don’t think we’ll get real progressive governance unless we have a realigning election (like 1932 or 1964). I think that election is within reach with Barack Obama and that it will be muted or squandered with Hillary Clinton. So, for me, just Obama’s nomination is potentially a huge boon for progressive politics. If nothing else, he’ll have bigger majorities than Clinton would have. But it’s more than that. I think Obama has some of the political gifts needed to do more with less. Anyway, I haven’t expounded on all my reasons for detesting the DLC and the gang that surrounds the Clintons, but I’ve said enough, I hope.
