Howard Dean took to the pages of Politico this morning to heartily endorse Hillary Clinton for president. I don’t know whether or not we should read anything into the timing of the piece, although I suspect it isn’t simply a matter of Dean waking up one day and deciding to submit this pitch to Tiger Beat on the Potomac. His support isn’t exactly breaking news, as he’s been talking her up for over a while now. As long ago as the summer of 2013, he told the Des Moines Register that he was supporting Hillary for president.
It’s less significant for what Howard Dean thinks than it is for legions of his former supporters, many of whom were animated by the votes Sens. John Edwards and John Kerry cast in favor of authorizing force in Iraq. Of course, Senator Hillary Clinton cast a vote in favor of using force, too, which led most of Dean’s adherents to align against Clinton’s campaign in 2008.
Dean doesn’t mention Hillary’s vote authorizing force in his piece, even to explain it away. It’s like it needs no explanation at all. He trusts her to nominate good Supreme Court justices, thinks she works well across the aisle, has confidence that she can sell a plan to help the middle class to the electorate, and figures that his differences will be dwarfed by his agreements.
Most importantly, he believes she “has the experience and knowledge required to protect American national security.”
Apparently, she gained this experience and knowledge in the twelve years that have elapsed since she gave Bush permission to “Fuck Saddam.”
To be frank about this, I have my doubts.
My impression is that Clinton had a hawkish attitude about Syria during her time serving as Secretary of State, and had her counsel been followed, we would have been arming ISIS years before they overtook Mosul and seized our arms without our consent. It is not my impression that she was prescient about what Libya would look like post-Gaddafi.
At a minimum, I would like Dean to address the issue that is obviously of tremendous concern to many, if not most, of his loyal supporters: Is Hillary likely to make the same kinds of reckless foreign policy commitments that she endorsed when serving as a senator and recommended as Secretary of State?
There’s a second tectonic plate shifting here on the left, and it has to do with the Clintons’ historical position within the Democratic Party. They come from the free trade, neoliberal, pro-business, deregulating wing that many progressives opposed during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Many more progressives have problems with Clinton’s economic and regulatory policies in retrospect, seeing in them seeds that bore the rotten fruit of the housing bubble and the financial collapse known as The Great Recession.
The candidacy of Howard Dean was to some degree hijacked by economic progressives in the sense that Dean didn’t so much invite them in on those terms as they came along for the ride with the antiwar progressives. Dean wasn’t running against Hillary or Clintonism, and so he isn’t turning his back on his followers by expressing his confidence in Hillary’s commitment to working people.
Nearly all of the gains in the past fifteen years have bypassed the vast majority of Americans, while the holdings of the top 20% have increased dramatically. This is a fundamental disparity that will be the greatest challenge our next President must tackle—how to reestablish a commitment to all of us to restore the opportunity to live and achieve the American Dream.
Hillary Clinton will not shrink from this challenge. In the coming months, I expect her to lay out her plans to attack income inequality and help rebuild the middle class. She knows how to sell a broad range of Americans on these policies, and has shown how to stand up against extremist economic policies…
…I am sure I will have disagreements with her as she focuses on getting Americans back to work and rebuilding an America that works for all of us. I value and respect her enough that whatever differences may exist will be minimal compared to the tasks we really need to do for the good of restoring our country.
A lot is being glossed over by “I am sure I will have disagreements with her” on her economic policies, especially for the nation of Deaniacs. You don’t have to be on the ramparts of an Occupy Wall Street protest to be politically motivated primarily be a sense that both parties (including the Clinton administration) have sold out the middle class and destroyed the American Dream. Dean was never a far-left progressive on these issues, but it still feels like he is disrespecting a lot of his fans by not even deigning to explain why he has such confidence in Hillary on these matters.
Maybe none of this will matter. Maybe Hillary will waltz to the nomination and easily win the presidential election. But it’d be nice to know if Dean is subscribing to a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” strategy or if he never really stood for things people thought he stood for.