Her Majesty
I’m still waiting for a chance to love Barak Obama. Perhaps once he begins endorsing particular policies, I’ll discover he’s got the right stuff. If he doesn’t soon, I may have to support Edwards. In the meantime, I’ve gotten pretty sick of Hilary Clinton.
This country has had extraordinarily poor leadership for the past five years or more, in large part due to Bush the Lesser, but even more due to the deeply corrupt Republican leadership that has done its level best to turn election victories into regime change by packing appointive positions with right-wing loyalists at the expense of merit, and to make the president answerable to no one, including the American public. We need a sharp reversal of these policies, and we need it soon. I don’t know whether the Democrats can provide it, but I’m damn sure the Republicans can’t. McCain might want to, but he doesn’t have even his own party’s love, and proved, in the end, willing to sell principle to woo the rabid partisans.
Given the need to reverse our anti-constitutional freefall, the Dems need to focus on winning, and winning big, across the board. Hilary has proven more interested in winning herself. Not content to criticize Obama’s silence on substantive issues, she—pardon me, her campaign managers—have decided to get right down to mudslinging even when there is nothing to discuss, as when they demanded an apology from Obama for something David Geffen said, and to return any campaign donations to show his sincerity. Wait, excuse me? Geffen didn’t step over any lines; he said she was polarizing, and ambitious. And so she is. Trying to turn that statement into an embarrassment for a rival, to hold that rival accountable for what a third party says, and especially to win the primary with money instead of ideas, is the kind of vicious trick we’ve seen too much of, and the very reason we need an electoral turnover.
I suspect Clinton is so eager to savage Obama because she feels the next presidential election already belongs to Democrats by default, given the abysmal approval ratings of the current administration. If so, she is wrong. The next Republican candidate will find it all too easy to disavow Bush; the right-wing habit of equating all enemies—terrorists, environmentalists, secularists, Satanists, pro-choicers, homosexuals—doesn’t work both directions, for some reason. Already, the major Republican contenders are hiding behind the flimsy excuse that they would never have supported a war in Iraq had they known Bush would handle it so badly.
Clinton should expect this from the eventual Republican candidate, because it’s precisely her own approach to Iraq. Since some people aren’t willing to forget she voted to give Bush the authority to launch a war, she’s settling for pretending it seemed like a good decision at the time, and that only with the benefit of hindsight can we realize how wrong it was, blinded as we all were by the charming Dick Cheney and his unassailable assurances of nuclear weapons in Iraq, the evidence too classified to share with mere Senators. I must protest. The war didn’t suddenly become wrong only after it went badly. It didn’t become wrong because Bush surprised the credulous with incompetence. It didn’t become wrong when we failed to find the promised WMDs. It was wrong when it was started, for reasons that we knew at the time. Mrs. Clinton’s pretense that she doesn’t bear some of the blame because, hey, she only voted for it is a steaming pile.
Perhaps most damning is a quality that is much harder to define than specifics like putting her interests before those of the nation or culpability for Iraq. She is an old-school democrat, the kind that led to the conservative vehemence that made Tom Delay, Fox News, massive deficits to support tax cuts for the rich, Guantanamo, war profiteering, a savaging of the national environment, and Jack Abramov possible. The term tax-and-spend is overused, but sometimes it deserves to stick. Clinton belongs to that school of government that believes having a program in place to address a problem is more important than that the program actually work, like universal health care without selective denial of services. She embraces the paradoxical racism of affirmative action, that racial minorities must be helped because they, being racial minorities, cannot achieve on their own. She feels eternal government subsidies are right and proper. She follows the currents of public opinion instead of holding American government to American ideals, which leaves her in the depressingly common Democratic disease of Mealy-mouth: failing to stand for anything or anyone, because she’s too busy embracing everything and everyone.
Senators from Illinois excepted, of course.