No Guilt Trip, Please
A five-point remedy to cure the worst case of sympathy for Hillary
I’ve heard several remarkably similar rationales from Californians who agonized over their vote in last week’s Democratic primary, but ended up plumping for Hillary Clinton. Their arguments go something like this.
Obama and Clinton both have their pluses and minuses, they said. Ultimately we have no clear idea what either of them would be like in office. Both have suffered attacks from supporters of the other. But the attacks on Clinton seem to have an extra edge to them – a snarky, mean-spirited, cut-her-down-to-size edge that could only betoken prejudice against a strong woman running for the White House. As a form of protest against that prejudice – a social prejudice, to be sure, rather than one emanating specifically from the Obama campaign – she gets it by a nose.
In what has become a remarkably muddy, if compelling, campaign season – made a little less muddy, perhaps, by Obama’s thumping series of primary and caucus victories since Super Tuesday – this strikes me as being an example of unnecessarily muddy thinking.
For a start, it ties the country’s future, and the future of much of the planet, to a form of identity politics that is both ludicrously parochial and also counter-productive. Nobody should vote for (or against) Hillary because she’s a woman, just as nobody should vote for or against Obama because he’s black, or half-white, or half-Kenyan, or from Illinois, or any other label you choose to attach to him. Or either of them.
Hillary’s gender isn’t going to determine the question of America’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil, or solve global warming, or limit the influence of special-interests lobbyists in Washington. To anyone who thinks that America electing its first female president sends a message in and of itself, I have some news. Britain has already had a taboo-breaking female prime minister, as has India. Germany currently has a female chancellor. Women also occupy the top political jobs in Chile, Argentina, Latvia, New Zealand, and any number of other countries. You don’t impress anyone by playing a long overdue game of catch-up.
Another flawed premise of the “Why Hillary?” rationale is that we don’t know what kind of leader she would be. On the contrary, I think we have a very good idea. True, it’s hard to find a dispassionate view of anyone with the last name Clinton in a country that remains deeply divided on the legacy of the first Clinton presidency. But, first of all, that divisiveness is a big clue in and of itself. We also have an abundance of indications – from the past, from the things Hillary appears to have learned and those she has not, from her campaigning style and the things she has said and not said on the stump – of exactly what we would be letting ourselves in for with a second Clinton presidency.
Here are a few pointers:
1-The Clintons don’t believe that corporate interests and the public interest need to be kept separate. This became clear from their earliest days in Arkansas, when Bill was first elected attorney general, the state’s top law officer, and Hillary went off to work for the Rose law firm, the state’s most powerful collection of corporate attorneys. Conflict of interest? They didn’t appear to see one. The pattern has held up since. The Bill Clinton presidency saw a veritable orgy of corporate campaign contributions, to both parties. Soft money increased almost tenfold during the Clinton years, and the number of corporations giving at least $100,000 quadrupled. Part of the reason Hillary’s push for universal health care failed was her deference to insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists and her notable failure to allow public scrutiny, or indeed any scrutiny, of the closed-door hearings she held before producing her unwieldy, unworkable final recommendations.
2-It’s all about her, and always has been. True, she worked as a children’s health advocate straight out of law school, but she made the switch to defending Wal-Mart and other big corporations with disarming speed. In the White House she rubbed a lot of people the wrong way by suggesting she would be Bill’s co-president, then insisting on her own West Wing office. In her Senate campaigns, she expended a lot of energy to look like she cared about the interests of New Yorkers, upstate as well as in Manhattan, but never completely convinced the voters, who admired her competence and hard work without quite buying her authenticity. She made sure she signed the $8 million deal for her memoirs the day before she was sworn in as a senator, thus circumventing any congressional ethics concerns. We still don’t know how much money she and Bill have amassed from their supposedly public service, because she won’t release her tax returns. But we do know she had $5 million in spare change to loan her campaign last month.
3-A lot of the antagonism Hillary has attracted she has brought upon herself, and is likely to continue to do so in future. Sure, she couldn’t have attained the heights she has without being tough, but, again and again, she has proved she has a tin ear when it comes to knowing when to go on the attack and when to avoid needless friction. She made some famous blunders in the 1992 campaign – insulting half of Middle America when she said she wasn’t “some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” and insulting stay-at-home moms when she said she wasn’t about to drop her career aspirations and bake cookies. During the health care fiasco, she threatened to “demonize” Senators who resisted her proposals – they demonized her right back. When she railed against the “vast right-wing conspiracy” arrayed against her and her husband, she put her finger on a genuine phenomenon, but was dead wrong about the context – the (correct) allegation that Bill had been up to no good with Monica Lewinsky. As a senator, she mellowed quite a bit, but her presidential bid has brought out a nasty side all over again – never more so than when baiting Barack Obama on race. Whether that was her idea or Bill’s, she richly deserved the backlash she reaped from that, including the complete collapse of her support among African Americans.
4-Don’t count on her to bring the country together – she can’t even bring her party together. Or, as Suzanne Goldenberg, the distinguished Washington correspondent for The Guardian newspaper of London writes in her new book Madam President: “Her attempts to position herself in the center [seem] driven by a desire to win the next election, not to reshape the philosophical underpinnings of the Democratic Party.” Bill was exactly the same. He antagonized the Democratic majority in Congress that he inherited, promptly lost that majority, then pushed his party so far away from any identifiable ideological mooring (by way of NAFTA, the end of welfare, and the corporate bean-feast that was the Telecommunications Act of 1996) that he condemned the Democrats to the electoral wilderness for several cycles after he was gone. Hillary, to date, has demonstrated exactly the same political instincts.
5-Whatever you thought of Bill, she ain’t no Bill. She is less experienced (don’t give us that “35 years” crap, she’s been an elected official for seven), less charismatic, less well spoken, and much less well liked. For all her strong-woman advocacy, she remains deeply in his shadow. In stark contrast to Margaret Thatcher, say, she wouldn’t be where she is today without her husband. Is that really the sort of feminist icon that America wants as its first female president?
None of this invalidates the decision to vote for Hillary. You might think she’s tough. She’s certainly smart. You can argue that her habit in the Senate of staking out safe positions and fighting only the battles she feels she can win is the sign of a mature politician who has learned from her mistakes and promises to be an effective, if not especially visionary, leader.
But don’t try and kid yourself that she represents any kind of change. She fits right into the longstanding tradition of top-down political leadership, with its sense of entitlement and propensity to corruption and cronyism over time. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
2008-02-14
Published: 02/13/2008
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