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.