Thoughts for Tuesday.
ryan / Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:14:00 GMT
Back in 2004, I spent a week canvassing African-American neighborhoods in West Virginia for John Kerry (who is now, I’m proud to say, my senator,) so I could hardly be called a fickle, anti-establishment, or disengaged young voter. I believe in the principles that drive the progressive cause of the Democratic party, and I’m happy to have always supported its ends.
But I’ve always resented my party’s tendency to elevate to positions of power the most pussy-footing, flip-flopping, unpersonable morons imaginable—folks who have historically been more interested in winning for its own sake than in thinking about why they wanted to win in the first place. These candidates forget, of course, that disingenuousness of this sort is utterly transparent to voters, and is therefore ultimately self-defeating. Sure, Al Gore and John Kerry—both of whom, incidentally, have become much awesomer after they stopped running for president and thus no longer serve as mere mouthpieces for their “handlers”—may have each squeaked through with a majority of the popular vote, but they never had a chance of building a new Reagan-style (cross-party) coalition behind a progressive agenda. In order to truly effect reform in American politics, a commanding electoral mandate is required. Health Care Reform, for example, is never going to happen without a sweeping endorsement by the American people of a candidate who advocates it. Yet the party keeps selecting figures either so wishy-washy or polarizing as to never have a chance of garnering even a shadow of that kind of vote. The best we’ve been able to hope for is to win by a few thousand votes in Ohio so we can appoint Supreme Court justices for four years.
At any rate, about that polarizing bit. Gore and Kerry may have been uninspired, but Bill Clinton, along with the poll-driven “policy triangulation” of his DLC, never even gave a shit about the progressive agenda. His was a presidency built on concessions to conservatism not for any ideological reason but solely in order to secure and retain his office. Secret midnight signings of things like the unconstitutional and bigoted “Defense of Marriage Act” and the wholesale destruction of Welfare are his legacy. This is a man who took time away from his primary campaign to fly back to Arkansas just to sign the death warrant of a mentally disabled black man who couldn’t even understand the murder charges brought against him. All this so he wouldn’t come off as “soft on crime” in the campaign. (If you want more background on these eight heinous years of putative experience Hillary Clinton is running on, I commend to you Christopher Hitchens’s brilliant book on the Clinton White House, No One Left to Lie To.)
I’ll share here a bit of Hitchens’s insights in Hillary, in the following excerpt from his recent article “The Case Against Hilary” from Slate:
On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy “experience”—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim “worked” well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton’s memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.
Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: “It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.”
Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy. Yet isn’t it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that?
Indeed. Posturing at the expense ideal. Pandering at the expense of truth. Concession before conviction.
And now, on the eve of the largest single-day primary in our nation’s history, the Democratic party teeters dangerously on the edge of re-anointing this vile, polarizing, disputatious, and dissembling duo—a symbol of all that is capitulatory, unidealistic, and opportunist in the Democratic party. I don’t look forward to another Clinton co-presidency any more than your run-of-the-mill corn-pone redneck Republican. I remember the rancorous political sclerosis of those formative years of my life and to return to them would utterly break my faith in the American political experiment (such as I have any left.)
But fortunately this year our choice is not between on the one side dismal and the other unelectable. We have Barack Obama, a politician of such natural talent, brute intelligence, and manifest sincerity that I believe he has the power to transform the topography of American politics. I remember watching Barack’s speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention and being overwhelmed. He reintroduced a rhetoric to the American political discourse that we haven’t heard since at least Regan or certainly Kennedy. He was the first politician I’ve heard in my lifetime actually to talk about the need to reunite and reconcile the false dichotomy between red and blue states, black and white, liberal and conservative, straight and gay.
This is an uncommon politician indeed. He actually takes part in the drafting of his own speeches, and he almost never talks to his campaign’s pollster. I watch his rallies (in particular his speech after his landslide victory in South Carolina,) and I’m moved to the verge of tears. Needless to say, the tears in my eyes when watching presidential candidates in the past have not been tears of inspiration. Barack Obama is something new entirely.
I recently attended a lecture by Laurence Tribe, a brilliant and articulate constitutional scholar at Harvard. In that lecture, Tribe unflinchingly intimated that Barack Obama was the brightest of all the 250,000+ students he had taught in his lifetime (a student body that includes a number of supreme court justices, among other luminaries in the law and government.) Indeed, where Mrs Clinton has knee-jerk policy triangulation and poll-driven flip-flopping, Obama has brilliance and insight, along with a confidence in his convictions. His longstanding opposition to the Iraq War (from long before it was politically palatable) shows a man of uncommon analytical prowess and willingness to be right. He is a political leader with his feet firmly planted in the reality-based community.
A great choice is before those of us who want to believe in American government again—those of us who care about peace, prosperity, and public policy that is informed by reason and optimism. Barack Obama needs your help; he needs your vote. Randall Monroe of xkcd put it best (as ever):
The Democratic party has a long, painful history of nominating unlikable, uncharismatic ‘default’ establishment candidates who are eventually swatted aside by the voters. Nominating Clinton would be continuing that tradition at the very time when we have a chance to do so much better. Let’s not let that chance slip by.
I want someone who can lead the country. When people grow cynical and detached from government, or blinded by partisanship, evil runs amok. Obama represents an honest shot at making our government something we can be proud of. I’m tired of throwing things at CNN. I’m tired of feeling depressed when I read speeches by the founding fathers. I want Jon Stewart to smile again. For a brief moment, next Tuesday, we’ll have a shot at finally getting things right. Please help.
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