Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, I mean. In this segment from today's Morning Joe, Miki grumps about Bill Clinton in a current interview responding to questions about the Lewinsky affair. This interview doesn't sound to me like he's ducking the issue, he engaged with the questions the reporter, Craig Melvin, was asked. Until it was obvious that that Melvin wasn't going to stop asking about it.
Miki seems to think anything less than permanently banning Bill Clinton from public life is insufficient punishment for him. Melvin seems to be outraged that Clinton didn't make a private apology to Monica. Even though the clip shows him very publicly apologized to her by name. And, of course, if he had spoken to her privately after the scandal, the media would still be drooling over it.
The scandal and Clinton's impeachment were two decades ago. But the national press got such a thrill out of it they keep going back to it at every opportunity.
Since the Democratic Party's remarkable cave-in during the January government shutdown crisis, I've been thinking a lot about important turning points for the Democratic Party that created such a strong sense among the party's Congressional representatives that they have to continually surrender to Republicans on important matters of policy. Even as the Republicans have become more and more aggressive in jamming their their preferred policies through, even when it means altering the rules of the game, both formal and informal.
One of the main programs identified with the Clinton Administration, even its "signature legislative achievement," (Jordan Weissmann) was called welfare reform. Not only was it substantively important. It also was a major concession in which the Democratic Party accepted the long-time conservative and Republican framing of a critical social and economic issue.
"Welfare" is one of those words that are benign in its routine daily usages but can take on negative political connotations in a polemical context. If someone says, "Parents have to take care for the welfare of their children," that has a straightforward meaning, a benign one of well-being. But "welfare" as applied to any kind of social program has a very negative connotation for conservatives, e.g. "loafers," "lazy black people."
The term has generally been applied to income-support payments for the poor. But the Republicans are trying now to expand the (for them) pejorative term to unemployment insurance, Medicaid, Medicare and even Social Security. The term "entitlement programs" also has a similar connotation for them. The latter term was a conscious propaganda innovation of conservatives. Both "welfare" and "entitlement programs" are used to promote an unfavorable attitude toward any kind of program that provides some kind of solidarity or economic support in hard times for ordinary working people.
And, like so much in American politics, criticism of "welfare" was highly racialized, with white conservatives (and some liberals) portraying it a program used and abused by black people. Even though a majority of "welfare" recipients were always white.
The Clinton reform, signed into law in 1996 and taking effect in 1997, replaced an income-support program for parents of minor children called Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The replacement program was known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). One of the features of the bill that achieved an important conservative goal is that it gave states much more discretion of the amounts and qualifications for receiving TANF assistance.
The 2016 "Retro" video from The New York Times recounts the history of the 1996 reform from the perspective of its 20th anniversary, Welfare and the Politics of Poverty 06/07/2016. Unfortunately, YouTube is not allowing the video to be embedded at this writing. The video provides numerous examples of the kind of polemical rhetoric used at the time. And the narrator's script appears to be sympathetic to it, despite it's being associated with the "liberal" New York Times. And, of course, there's some Both Sides Do It thrown in.
It quotes St. Reagan declaring, "Welfare has proliferated and grown into a Leviathan of unsupportable dimensions." And it shows Bill Clinton adopting a similar framing, if less hysterically expressed: "Welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life." It was also the case that Clinton emphasized the importance of work opportunities for welfare recipients. In theory, that was a position that liberals and progressives could share. But in practice, any kind of active job programs were not a serious part of the policy mix.
It's important in the context of its effects on Democrats to note that Clinton twice vetoed Republican-backed welfare reform bills on the grounds they were too punitive. But in 1996, he signed one that was quite draconian in its terms and effects. The video quotes Ron Haskins, who was one of the drafters of the Republican bill that Clinton signed, still praising Bill Clinton two decades later for signing it (after 4:00). "Think of a Democratic President that would sign a welfare reform bill like that. President Gore wouldn'a done it. Kennedys would never have done it. There are many Republicans that wouldn'a done a bill as tough as the one that was passed in 1996."
Notice that the narrator in this 2016 film refers to the pre-1996 AFDC as a "once sacred entitlement." Who had considered it sacred is not clear. Conservatives were never among them.
Jared Bernstein recalled the various themes in the welfare reform debate in Reforming Welfare ReformThe American Prospect 12/19/2001:
What was Congress trying to achieve? Different people had different goals, and the law reflects these differing views. For some the 1996 law was largely about cutting welfare caseloads or reducing spending; for some it was about promoting work; for some it was about broadening state flexibility, reducing federal authority, and curtailing individual rights; and for some it was about reducing out-of-wedlock births. For much of the public, though, the goal was that people who were able to work should do so. Many in the progressive community shared this goal but feared that the law's approach--freezing federal spending, ending individual rights, imposing time limits, creating strong incentives to cut caseloads--would mean that instead of helping parents enter and progress in the labor force, states would simply restrict assistance for families that needed help. And many progressives feared the consequences if public assistance was denied to families with the weakest labor market prospects in a low-wage labor market that was already failing many of its participants.
Throughout the 1996 debates, discussion of one goal was conspicuously lacking: There was much talk about the need to promote work and reduce welfare, but little discussion of the need to reduce poverty and promote the well-being of low-income families. Instead, both conservatives and, to a great extent, the Clinton administration, created a picture in which the principal problem was seen as too many families on welfare for too long. The obvious solution was to cut caseloads by getting families to leave welfare. [my emphasis]
Apart from any considerations of social solidarity or humanitarian concern, one of the benefits of such income-support programs is that they have "countercyclical" effects. When the economy is expanding, as it was doing in the mid-1990 with the tech bubble and further in the 2000s with the real estate bubble, more people can get jobs and the payments on income-support programs act as a restraint on what economists and the business press like to call "overheating" of the economy. During recessions, the payments expand and provide a stimulative effect to the economy, helping to prevent deflation and shortening the length of the recession. The human and economic-policy cost of the TANF reform became very evident during the Great Recession.
Analyses on the destructive economic effects of the Clinton welfare reforms are in no shortage.
Despite being home to one of the nation’s most crushing child poverty rates, the state [of Arizona] has all but stopped giving cash assistance to its needy. During 2014, for every 100 poor families with children in Arizona, just 8 families received aid. And even that tiny fraction is likely to shrink. Last year, while trying to chip away at a $1 billion budget deficit, lawmakers lowered the maximum amount of time Arizonans could receive welfare payments before being kicked off the rolls permanently — it’s now just 12 months. ...
The death of welfare in Arizona isn’t an exception; the program has shriveled just as badly in many other states, especially across the Deep South and West. Even in most of the states that are more generous than Arizona about giving benefits to the poor, welfare has still dwindled during the postrecession era. That’s because its funding was never designed to grow along with inflation—or with the U.S. population. For all intents and purposes, welfare is becoming a zombie system rather than the bridge from poverty to work that its reformers envisioned.
And, of course, it was the signature legislative achievement of Bill Clinton’s presidency. [my emphasis]
After 10:35 in the video, we hear Bill Clinton express the vain hope by which he justified signing the bill to Democrats: "After I sign my name this bill [TANF], welfare will no longer be a political issue." Which was true in the sense that the Democratic President had stopped fighting for Democratic priorities and Democratic constituents on "welfare," instead surrendering to the Republican side. A segment from 2014 shows Clinton in 2014 saying that he couldn't have foreseen that there would be a Tea Party movement that would try to scapegoat poor people, i.e., "that would believe, one more time, that poor people are the problem in America."
Which I would have to say if laughably unconvincing. Especially since there were plenty of Democrats in 1996 who did foresee such a thing. It didn't require any special visionary talent to do so. And in the real world, it did nothing of consequence to slow down the radicalization of the Republican Party. If anything, such a consequential surrender on Clinton's part only encouraged it.
But Clinton in that same segment still insisted in 2014 that TANF "did far more good than harm."
The 1996 welfare "reform" was a major step in the neoliberal neutering of the Democratic Party. That was one of the most significant steps on the road that led the Democrats to the historic losses at all levels in 2016. Including Hillary Clinton losing the Electoral College vote to the Orange Clown.
Michael Tomasky on the suddenly fashionable notion among some Democratic liberals that Bill clinton should have resigned over the Monica Lewinsky affair (Hell No, Bill Clinton Shouldn’t Have ResignedDaily Beast 11/21/2017):
The idea that Clinton should have resigned is insane. It’s insane from the perspective of the historical record, which in no way supports the idea that he should have quit his job. And it’s insane for political purposes today, given that it remains one of the top priorities of the right to smear and discredit both Clintons in the history books, a project that liberals should in no way, shape, or form be abetting.
The fact that we are actively discussing the Bill Clinton cheating scandals of the 1990s is a major sign that the Republicans are way, way better at exploiting such scandals politically than Democrats are.
And that's in very large part because they are much savvier than Democrats about what suckers the corporate media are for not only sex stories and stories about anyone named Clinton, but also their obsession with the false equivalence of Both Sides Do It on every issue and practice all the time.
I'm tempted to say that it's a sign of progress that it a whole week, more-or-less, for the credible claims made by numerous women about sleazy and even violent behavior of Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore toward teenage girls when he was in his 30s to be replaced by a return to the media' Great Clinton Penis Hunt that they loved so much during the 1990s.
Tomasky says of the Clinton impeachment:
The most important point is that the Republican effort to remove Clinton from office was a constitutional coup d’etat. If you’re young—all this hatred you see today, this right-wing rage machine (which does have its much smaller counterpart on the left); it all started then. The right hated Bill Clinton pretty much because he was a liberal (a moderate-liberal, but as they saw him, a dangerous leftist) from the Woodstock generation who had the effrontery to beat a Republican incumbent at a time when conservatives thought the presidency was theirs for life. Literally from the day he won, some people were plotting how to undo the voters’ verdict. And finally, years later, he handed them some rope.
That is what liberals were confronting. The right’s aim was to nullify a presidential election. Two of them. If Clinton had acquiesced in that, having obviously committed no high crime or misdemeanor, the precedent would have been chilling. No Democratic president after him would have been safe from a similar assault. They would have gone straight after President Gore, on the slightly dodgy fund-raising stuff, and they’d have had the added talking point that Gore’s presidency was especially illegitimate because unlike Clinton he wasn’t even elected. I’m not saying they could have driven Gore from office. I am saying they’d have tried, and they’d have tried with Barack Obama or whatever Democrat came next in that timeline, too. There is no way on earth Clinton should have opened that door. [my emphasis]
That's a good point. No matter that they hated him dearly, the Republicans never seriously tried to impeach Barack Obama.
I agree with Tomasky's judgment, "And it’s insane for political purposes today, given that it remains one of the top priorities of the right to smear and discredit both Clintons in the history books." Although he adds at the end, "a project that liberals should in no way, shape, or form be abetting." That last part goes a little far from my perspective. There is a lot about the Clinton deregulation policies and military interventions that deserve to be responsibly criticized. The Clinton Administration's policies toward Russia are looking more and more dubious all the time, including the ham-handed intervention in the Russian election of 1996:
Casting out Al Franken, who has been a passionate, zealous defender of women’s rights in a Senate grown ever more hostile to them, could remove an important weapon in the embattled Democratic arsenal.
A reassessment of Bill Clinton’s behavior era could have the same counter-productive effect. His accusers already signed up to help Donald Trump get elected when they appeared with him before one of the presidential debates. They have all made a devil’s bargain with various Republican creeps, including Roger Stone.
One of Trump’s key political advisers recently told me that the appearance of the Clinton accusers with Trump “completely blunted the damage of the Access Hollywood tape. It was a very important turning point in the campaign.” The Clinton accusers helped elect a different sexual predator. And unlike Clinton, who was an ally of the women’s movement, Trump is its mortal enemy. [my emphasis]
Joe Conason, co-author with Gene Lyons of The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000), has addressed two sets of Clinton pseudoscandals. Uranium One is a relatively new entry in the portfolio of Clinton pseudoscandals. The allegation is that Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was bribed by Russians via the Clinton Foundation into approving the sale of a company named Uranium One to a state-owned Russian company, Rosatom.
Neither the House Republicans nor Sessions have yet explained how the Clintons could have controlled the disposition of Uranium One's assets. Nor have they explained how the Uranium One deal, which prohibited the Russians from selling so much as an ounce of uranium ore outside the borders of the United States, could have endangered American national security.
And they have also failed to explain why the entire deal matters anyway, since the portion of U.S. reserves owned by Uranium One represents a tiny fraction of a fraction — a tenth of 1% — of the world's uranium supply, most of which comes from Kazakhstan, Australia and Canada.
He sketches out the claim here:
Through a complex series of business deals, Russia had obtained control of a portion of U.S. uranium reserves, using a Vancouver-based company called Uranium One. Some of the Canadian investors who profited from the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom, the Russian state-owned atomic energy corporation, had given millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.
Russia's acquisition of American uranium had been approved by the State Department while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State. And Bill Clinton had received a $500,000 fee for a speech delivered in Moscow at a bank that had some connection with Uranium One.
What weakened that apparently damning story was a single big flaw: Hillary Clinton never had the sole authority to sign off on the sale of Uranium One to the Russians, but held only a single seat on a government panel that included members from nine agencies, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
What Conason doesn't say, though I think it's important, is that the laws are far too permissive on ways that donors and/or bribers (sometimes there is no difference) can channel money to candidates and campaigns. Payments to a candidates spouse of, say, $500,000 for a single speech - and even the prospect of earning such speaking fees after leaving office - certainly can be used in that way. But it's not at all clear that such a thing occurred in the Uranium One deal, or that the payments to the Clinton Foundation were in any way illegal. It looks like a pure pseudoscandal to me.
But I see this problem in the larger context of the Citizens' United campaign-funding regime, which is an oligarchical system that inevitably creates de facto corruption, even if much of it is de jure legal.
And, of course, our Pod Pundits can never resist a return to the Bill Clinton Penis Hunt of the 1990s. And the Republicans are skilled in playing to that obsession and to the corporate media's posture of trying to provide a Both Sides Do It phony equivalency between the Democratic and Republican parties on all issues.
So it took only a few days after the Roy Moore sex scandals broke for the Republicans to get the media back on the BCPH again. And there are always Democrats feckless enough to play the same game. Conason addresses the Return Of The BCPH in A ‘Reckoning’ For Bill Clinton? Don’t Forget Starr’s $70 Million ProbeNational Memo 11/17/2017:
Unlike Weinstein, Moore, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, or any of the dozens of powerful men whose misdeeds have provoked a wave of justified fury, Clinton endured a long, painful, and very costly series of official investigations of his alleged sexual misdeeds. Various accounts of his private behavior, whether invented or truthful, filled thousands of hours of national airtime, millions of inches of newsprint, and dozens of books ....
Unlike the Fox News criminals and many other creeps who quietly reached settlements that kept the most lurid details of their behavior under court seal, Clinton’s alleged acts were litigated publicly all the way to the Supreme Court — with attendant coverage that included, among other embarrassments, a debate about the appearance of his penis.
And most important, unlike any of those now in the dock, Clinton underwent a $70-million investigation by a zealous federal inquisitor who had all the powers of the Justice Department, a team of relentless and experienced prosecutors, and the forensic services of the FBI, which he employed in a wide-ranging sex probe that went back decades. That special prosecutor’s name was Kenneth W. Starr. He would be dismayed to learn that his dogged efforts to destroy Clinton have so soon been forgotten.
He also reminds us of the eager but unsuccessful results of Kenneth Starr to validate the claims of Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, two favorite icons of the latest BCPH. Which, for the Republicans, will apparently never goes away. I expect them to be harping on it 50 years from now. He also reminds us of the outcome of Paula Jones' charges.
Even after all this time, I still feel stunned when I'm reminded by an article like this how ridiculous the Clinton pseudoscandals lumped under the "Whitewater" rubric really were.
It was the New York Times that vaulted the Whitewater affair into a national issue by its credulous reporting in 1992, which was very competently dissected by Conason and Lyons in The Hunting of the President, and earlier by Lyons in Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater (1996), and in the documentary film version of The Hunting of the President.
So the NYT at least deserves credit for reporting on the final report of the special counsel in the Whitewater case, headed in its last phase by Robert Ray, Final Report By Prosecutor On Clintons Is Released 03/21/2002
In a final report that ends the Whitewater investigation that sprawled across a range of subjects and vexed President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton for most of his two terms in the White House, the independent counsel's office said today that there was insufficient evidence to show that either committed any crimes.
Robert W. Ray, the last occupant of the office of independent counsel for Whitewater matters, said in the 2,090-page report that the Clintons' principal business partner in the Whitewater land development scheme in Arkansas, James B. McDougal, had committed several acts of fraud, but that there was no credible evidence that the Clintons either knew of or participated in those acts.
The report concluded the long legal melodrama that resulted in Mr. Clinton's impeachment and sharply split the nation about whether he was the victim of a politically motivated criminal investigation or had truly committed substantial offenses.
The whole underlying pseudoscandal around Whitewater turned out to have been completely bogus.
Russia's attempted interference in the 2016 US Presidential election is a serious concern. And, as I've been saying all year, should be carefully investigated and the facts put before the American public.
But Russian propaganda bots aren't going to be any "smoking gun" that would expose criminal acts of collusion by the Trump campaign. The financial connections look far more promising as a source of such legal problems, and the most promising route to uncovering any actual acts of collusion on the campaign. I'm speculating, of course, based on what we know in the public record so far.
But I've always worried that the Democrats were taking a careless approach to the Russian election-interference issue, too carelessly trying to blame Russian interference for Hillary's loss and treating any contact with Russians, or involvement with Russian business, or even agree with Russia's position on an issue as per se a sign of a sinister association or allegiance.
In researching the events of 1917 in Russia in connection with the posts I'm doing around the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia, one of the intriguing historical issues I've focused on is the "German gold" issues, i.e., the claim that the Bolshevik Party was being heavily financed by the German Kaiser and even acting on his behalf. I'll deal with that issue in a later post. But the accusation involves companies allegedly used by to launder the funds from the German Treasury to the Bolsheviks. It's a fascinating piece of historical forensic accounting.
The record-keeping on international financial transactions is much more elaborate today than in 1917. But so are the possibilities of setting up shell companies and money-laundering operations. Which can be difficult enough for intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to unravel. And even more difficult to boil down to clear and coherent claims that will be effective for use in real-time political debates.
I was reminded of these difficulties by a couple of different kinds of story recently. Julia Ioffe, who has done some of the most level-headed reporting and commentary on the Russia election interference, writes about The History of Russian Involvement in America's Race WarsAtlantic 10/21/2017. She describes briefly how the Soviet Union incorporated racial discrimination in America into their international propaganda. And she makes it very clear that they were for the most part using real events and problems:
This came at a critical time for time for the United States. After World War II, the U.S. was a new global power locked in an ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. As the United States tried to convince countries to join its sphere by taking up democracy and liberal values, the U.S. government was competing with the Soviets in parts of the world where images of white cops turning fire hoses and attack dogs on black protesters did not sit well—especially considering that this was coinciding with the wave African countries declaring independence from white colonial rulers. “Here at the United Nations I can see clearly the harm that the riots in Little Rock are doing to our foreign relations,” Henry Cabot Lodge, then the U.S. ambassador to the UN, wrote to President Eisenhower in 1957. “More than two-thirds of the world is non-white and the reactions of the representatives of these people is easy to see. I suspect that we lost several votes on the Chinese communist item because of Little Rock.”
“The Russian objective then was to disrupt U.S. international relations and undermine U.S. power in the world, and undermine the appeal of U.S. democracy to other countries,” says [historian Mary] Dudziak, and Lodge was reflecting a central concern at the State Department at the time: The Soviet propaganda was working. American diplomats were reporting back both their chagrin and the difficulty of preaching democracy when images of the violence around the civil rights movement were reported all over the world, and amplified by Soviet or communist propaganda. On a trip to Latin America, then-Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife were met with protestors chanting, “Little Rock! Little Rock!” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles complained that “this situation was ruining our foreign policy. The effect of this in Asia and Africa will be worse for us than Hungary was for the Russians.” Ultimately, he prevailed on Eisenhower to insert a passage into his national address on Little Rock that directly addressed the discrepancy that Soviet propaganda was highlighting—and spinning as American hypocrisy. Whenever the Soviet Union was criticized for its human rights abuses, the rebuttal became, “And you lynch Negroes.”
This is standard fare in international diplomacy and politics. If Country A criticizes Country B over some human rights issue or violation of international law, Country B can always find something to throw back in Country A's face along the same lines.
And it's also common as dirt in politics to refer to what people in other countries are thinking and saying about an issue. Our Allies will think we're unreliable! Credibility in the world! Our example to the world! The US narrative that we should be the lighthouse to the world, the city on the hill, the model for the Free World, that everybody in the world wants to be like America, is such a well-established framing for political rhetoric in the US that worrying about foreign opinion is an everyday concern in foreign affairs and thus in domestic politics.
At the same time, being sucked by an unfriendly power is considered not only dastardly, but evidence of un-Americanism and acting on behalf of a foreign power. Segregationists have always argued that civil rights advocates were Communists and therefore agents of a foreign power, particularly as long as the Soviet Union still existed. And I assume that may be what motivated these tweets from Rebecca Pierce in response to Ioffe's article:
Anti-Blacknesss is reducing Civil Rights struggle to a Cold War propagand tool and giving US govt the credit. Y’all don’t see us as people pic.twitter.com/i8hTxIeUcC
I didn't have that impression that's what Ioffe was trying to do in that article. But it also struck me in reading it that it could easily be misused by others in that way. Maybe too easy.
A different kind of foreign involvement story is also in the news this week. More on Hillary and the uranium: John Solomon and Alison Spann, FBI watched, then acted as Russian spy moved closer to Hillary ClintonThe Hill 10/22/17. The story says explicitly, "There is no evidence in any of the public records that the FBI believed that the Clintons or anyone close to them did anything illegal. But there’s definitive evidence the Russians were seeking their influence with a specific eye on the State Department."
Of course they were. That's what all countries do. Unless they have too few resources to attempt it. I thought as I was reading this, the story does remind us once again that the Clintons should have been more scrupulous in their conduct of the Clinton Foundation to avoid an appearance of improper influence at work.
But Clinton pseudoscandals have been a minor industry since the New York Times broke its first Whitewater story. And the mainstream media continue to eat them up even decades later. And the Republicans don't even need the appearance of wrongdoing to rave about new Clinton pseudoscandals. So, no surprise here: Olivia Beavers, House GOP leaders open probe into FBI's handling of Clinton investigationThe Hill 10/24/17
Digby Parton looks at this latest Republican ploy in Latest weird right-wing trick: The Russians were actually helping Hillary!Salon 10/24/2017. The Reps were encouraged by a new report this week that special prosecutor Robert Mueller is looking into possible failure to register as a foreign agent by a lobbying firm considered to by close to the Democrats:
Needless to say, the right-wing media went nuts at this news. This was the hook they've been waiting for. For months they've been pushing a narrative that has Hillary Clinton as the real beneficiary of Russian manipulation, and this is supposed to be proof that connects all the dots. Rush Limbaugh has cooked up a massive conspiracy featuring President Barack Obama, Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Russians over that uranium sale from years ago that's going to blow the lid off everything. (If you can make heads or tails out of what Limbaugh says happened or will happen, take a drink. You need it.)
A New York Times story on Monday indicated that the three congressional committees that were supposed to be looking into Russian interference in the election, and possible collusion with the Trump campaign, are hitting a wall. Partisan infighting and GOP lack of focus and interest are pointing toward the conclusion that nothing will be done about any of it. If Mueller's investigation comes up with something concrete, maybe they'll take another look -- but if anyone was expecting the U.S. Congress to be even slightly concerned about the propaganda campaign, the hacking or the attempts to break into actual voting systems, they're going to be disappointed. The Republicans don't give a damn about any of that and they are running the show. [my emphasis]
The respectable posturing by Republican figures like Shrub Bush and Bob Corker is entertaining. But until the Republicans start taking Trump's misconduct seriously enough to investigate the Russian interference in the election and Trump's own questionable behavior as possibly impeachable offenses, it's hard to take them seriously.
Kathleen Geier says her goodbyes to the Clinton Era in The Clintons’ Dominance of Democratic Politics Is Over—And They Will Not Be Remembered FondlyIn These Times 11/28/2016. Her perspective is one that is familiar in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, pointing to how the neoliberalism in politics and economics that so heavily influenced both Bill and Hillary have left the Democratic Party at the unpleasant moment in which it now finds itself.
I think of the issues raised by the election outcome in three broad categories: the social context, strategic and tactical approaches, and organizational ones.
Geier's fifth point falls into the organizational area, the fallout from from the Obama/Hillary/Debbie Wasserman-Schultz policy of neglecting to build and support the Democratic Party organization in all parts of the country:
Theda Skocpol has cited another factor in Clinton’s loss: the Democrats' lack of organizational infrastructure in non-urban areas. The GOP has a strong organizational base in these regions, including get-out-the-vote efforts run by the Christian right, the NRA, the Koch organizations, and the Republican Party itself. But the Dems have let their own party organizations wither on the vine, and the unions which were once the Democrats’ stronghold in the critical Rust Belt region have declined dramatically. When it comes to getting voters to the polls in rural areas, the Democrats are now at a tremendous structural disadvantage. To be sure, this a party-wide, rather than a Clinton-only, failure. But Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama bear strong responsibility here. Each them served for two terms but showed little interest in building the party.
This observation touches both the strategic messaging of the Hillary Clinton campaign this year and the broader economic conditions:
In [a] stroke of bitter poetic justice, the fruits of Clintons' own long-ago policies came back to haunt them. NAFTA and other Clinton “free” trade deals devastated the Rust Belt and created the ravaged communities and the despair that compelled many working class voters in those areas pull the lever for the despicable Trump.
A post-election report by the pollster Stanley Greenberg confirms that Clinton's decision to shun a progressive economic appeal was a fatal error. Greenberg found that “polls showed fairly resilient support with white working class women, until the Clinton campaign stopped talking about economic change.” When the Greenberg team tested a Democratic message attacking Trump for his character vs. a message “demanding big economic changes” and attacking Trump for “supporting for trickle-down and protecting corporate special interests,” they found that the economic message “performed dramatically better,” particularly among key voter groups like millennials, white unmarried women and white working class women.
I'm not persuaded by the simple assertion that trade deals as such "devatated the Rust Belt," etc. Isolating the effects of trade on employment is complicated because so many factors are interacting. Even left-leaning economists who emphasize the problems of unemployment, underemployment and the growth of inequality like New Keynesian Paul Krugman and post-Keynesian Jamie Galbraith caution about blaming trade in physical goods as the main culprit in de-industrialization.
There are real problems with the so-called trade treaties like TTIP and TPP. But those problems mainly lie in their deregulation provisions, especially the destabilizing effects of removing restrictions of transfers of capital, which is a whole different animal from trade in goods. And even the clearest negative effects of international trade in goods in the United States are part of a larger context of neoliberal policies of privatization, restrictions and reductions on public services, severe neglect of public infrastructure and an economic ideology that drastically de-emphasizes or opposes public policies aimed at supporting employment. This is coupled with an unrealistic policy assumption that education will counteract the effects of declining industrial employment by equipping people for different kinds of jobs, at the same time that access to higher education is becoming more and more expensive and student debt itself has become not only a major burden for individuals but a significant drag on economic growth.
"Trade" treaties like NAFTA, TPP and TTIP have become a symbol of the much broader and very real problems caused by neoliberalism.
An accompanying article in In These Times by Susan Douglas reflects on how gender may have affected the Presidential election outcome, The Woman Who Might Have Been President 11/28/2016:
But can we please remember this: In 2015, Hillary Clinton was listed by Gallup, for a record 20th time, as the woman Americans admired most. So we must come to terms with this sad fact, as Penn State professor Terri Vescio put it, “The more female politicians are seen as striving for power, the less they’re trusted and the more moral outrage gets directed at them.” Not all Trump voters are misogynists, but sexism played a role in his victory, as evidenced, in part, by all the Trump regalia calling Hillary a “bitch.”
One of the ugliest legacies of Bill Clinton's neoliberal/DLC Presidency is his notorious welfare "reform," aka, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA).
Blatantly bad results were forestalled by the tech boom of the 1990s. But once the inevitable recessions started hitting, and then the 2008 financial crash that wase greatly facilitated by the success of Clinton's financial-deregulation policies, then the ugly sides became obvious to anyone willing to look.
Krissy Clark reports on part of the ongoing bad results in The DisconnectedSlate 06/03/2016.
It’s true that there was a large drop in black poverty under Clinton’s presidency, with the share of black families in poverty falling from about 33 percent when he took office to just under 23 percent by the time he left. But that downward trend began long before welfare reform was signed into law in 1996, and it was short-lived. By 2002, the rate started climbing again as the country entered a recession.
The same story played out with poverty generally. While the booming economy of the 1990s provided enough jobs such that people who were forced to work in order to receive welfare benefits were able to find them, as soon as the economy faltered that story faltered as well and recipients fell into hard times. The work requirements havebeenrepeatedlyfoundto significantly increase financial hardship for those who lose benefits because they can’t find work.
Meanwhile, after reform, welfare was less and less able to help those at the very bottom. The number of families living at half the poverty line, or less than $12,000 a year for a family four, is higher now than in 1996, and extreme poverty — families who live on $2 or less per person a day — has risen 159 percent since then, especially among those who were most directly impacted by welfare changes.
The Clinton-Obama brand of neoliberalism doesn't entirely reject Keynesian countercyclical economic policies, aka, bonehead macroeconomics. When Obama took office in 2009, he got enough of an economic stimulus bill passed with Democratic majorities in Congress to restimulate the economy to a significant extent. Even the Cheney-Bush Administration's panic over the 2008 crisis lead them to bail out some banks in an attempt to stabilize the economy.
But Obama clearly believes in neoliberal, i.e., anti-Keynesian/Herbert Hoover/Angela Merkel economics. That's why even in 2009 he proceeded with setting up the infamous Simpson-Bowles Commission to promote cutbacks in Social Security and promote general domestic spending cutbacks when the US and world economies clearly needed active contracyclical stimulus for a while yet.
Frances Fox Piven, since built into some bizarre Obama conspiracy theory by Glenn Beck, responded to Ellwood's article in Was Welfare Reform Worthwhile?The American Prospect July-Aug 1996. The online version misleadingly shows only Ellwood himself as the author; he actually just has a brief rejoinder at the end. But Piven writes:
Clinton was using the welfare issue not as an opportunity to relieve poverty, but as an opportunity to gain support by inciting popular indignation at welfare. Welfare reform became an argument about why poor women were to blame for so much that was wrong with America. No wonder the administration has been so reluctant to refuse even the most draconian state requests for waivers. After 1994, of course, the Republican Congress quickly snatched back the welfare issue, which the Clinton administration has helped to heat up.
Ellwood thinks the diverse Republican efforts at welfare spending rollbacks, work enforcement, benefit cuts, strict rules, and devolution to the states are contradictory, without "shared conviction." I think he again misses the point. These policy proposals are not mainly about the design of rational interventions in social life. Rather, they continue, unmodulated by any liberal compunctions, the political strategy begun by Clinton, of pointing to the failures of poor women as an explanation for the cultural ruptures and economic insecurities of contemporary American life.
It's almost a case of damning by faint praise. He sort of says, I prefer Bernie, but I'm endorsing Hillary because I'm thinking about the SDS split in 1969. Or something.
His approach pretty much comes down to the Clinton campaign's basic message in the primaries:
Somehow I'm thinking Hillary's campaign won't be asking to Tom to campaign for her:
There are two Hillary Clintons. First, the early feminist, champion of children’s rights, and chair of the Children’s Defense Fund; and second, the Hillary who has grown more hawkish and prone to seeking “win-win” solutions with corporate America. When she seems to tack back towards her roots, it is usually in response to Bernie and new social movements. She hasn’t changed as much as the Democratic Party has, responding to new and resurgent movements demanding Wall Street reform, police and prison reform, immigrant rights and a $15-an-hour minimum wage, fair trade, action on climate change, LGBT rights, and more.
The peace movements from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, too, are a living legacy that fuels the public majority against sending ground troops into the fiery jaws of war another time. Bernie voted for the war in Afghanistan, but correctly faults Hillary for her hawkish impulse towards regime change. We are likely to live under a what amounts to a war presidency until either a new catastrophe or new movement leads to an alternative to the “Long War” on terrorism.
I usually find what Tom Hayden says worth listening to. And that's why I'm paying attention to this. But this argument strikes me as odd. It really sounds like he's just tired of thinking about the primary campaign and wants it to end. Which is kind of the Hillary camp's position, too.
Since we're going to be arguing about it for a while, let us stipulate that when Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime and Control Act in 1994 he did not single-handedly launch the destructive effects of mass incarceration and racial disparity in our legal system. What he did was put a conservative Democratic gloss on a process that began in the modern era with Lyndon Johnson's Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act in 1968, and that accelerated with Ronald Reagan's Omnibus Crime Bill in 1984. But that very fact clinches the case that the current critics of the 1994 bill — which Clinton himself has admitted was a mistake — are trying to make against it. It was one piece of a decades-old bipartisan "anti-crime" crusade that turned into an unthinking beast in our democracy, the damage from which fell most harshly on racial minorities, especially African Americans. It doesn't lessen the culpability of Clinton's bill that it was part of a 30-year effort that came to what are now seen as inevitably destructive conclusions. It amplifies it.
Let us also stipulate, because we are not five years old, that there were more than a few triangulated political motives for Clinton's having signed the bill. After all, his administration was a triumph for the politics of the Democratic Leadership Council, the famously business-friendly conservative Democratic operation that rose to power first as an opposition force to the New Deal liberalism of people like George McGovern and Walter Mondale, and then evolved into an opposition force to the new progressive coalition that had lined up behind Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. (Jackson memorably once cracked that DLC stood for "Democrats for the Leisure Class.") By the time Clinton came around to run for president, the DLC was dedicated to protecting the victories it had won over McGovern and Mondale against the forces within the party that Jackson's campaigns had empowered. Clinton, because he once was a brilliant politician, managed to keep both of these horses in harness, but there was no doubt where his policy heart lay — hence, the crime bill, which did not launch the era of mass incarceration, but added to it immeasurably. [my emphasis]
There's no question that part of the Sanders campaign's appeal is its ability to engage young people as members of a kind of movement. (This has drawn more than a little condescension from people who really ought to know better.) It's not so much that he's trying to rebuild the Obama coalition as he's trying to recapture its spirit. HRC has struggled mightily, and not altogether unsuccessfully, to do the same thing. An era in which the first woman president followed the first African-American president would be one of the most remarkable periods in American political history — and the most remarkable period in American electoral history — and it would likely keep historians busy for the next couple of centuries.
But her primary strength, that in terms of a CV, she might be the most qualified presidential candidate that we've seen since James Monroe, by a curious kind of reverse English, keeps that enthusiasm spinning just out of her reach. She has been the wife of the governor of Arkansas, a gifted public interest lawyer and a successful corporate counsel, First Lady of the United States, a senator from a huge and important state, the Secretary of State, and now she's running for president, as the odds-on favorite, for the second time. She is unquestionably part of the establishment, but she's also undeniably a trailblazer in terms of women's rights. She's an outsider by birth and an insider by resume. It would take a formidable politician to be able to use both of those qualities to maximum advantage. (If she combined her background with her husband's natural political skillz, we'd likely wake up next November to find her Empress Of The Universe.) And she is not that pol. Not yet, anyway. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next Tuesday.
It seems to me at this point that Hillary has a mixed message against Sanders in the primaries. On the one hand, she stresses that she's a progressive, and more progressive than Bernie on issues like financial regulation and gun proliferation, and she's got better experience to accomplish things.
On the other hand, her campaign calls Bernie out for being "extreme" and a "socialist," and suggesting by not-very-subtle innuendo that he's a commie.
Those messages contradict each other. If she's not only to the left of Bernie and more likely to get those left ideas enacted, and Bernie's a commie, what does that make Hillary? An anarchist? And the Republicans will make sure she feels the full force of the blowback from that accusation in the general election.
It's a muddled message, in other words.
But I think it also limits her ability to put across the kind of strong message to the Party base that Pierce is suggesting she potentially could.
But what frustrates the Democratic base about Obama and Democrats in Congress is really not so much that the Dems don't propose enough neo-New Deal measures. It more that they seem unwilling to fight for what they do propose. For the issues on which they run.
And it seems to me that Hillary's best asset among the base is that she's a fighter. But instead selling herself as the fighter who has no illusions about how crazy and intransigent today's Republican Party is, she comes off more like she's saying, hey, we we need eight more years of pointless efforts at bipartisanship and pre-compromised proposals that the Congress whittles down from there.
What's the difference between what you said about then Senator Obama and what you're saying about Senator Sanders?
SEC. HILLARY CLINTON:
There's a very big difference. In 2008, Senator Obama had really done his homework in the Senate. He'd been there, by that time, a few years. He had developed a network of advisors on national security and foreign policy issues. They were very diligent and focused on making sure he was ready, that he had as broad a set of views as possible.
And they really went toe-to-toe with all the people supporting me. That's not happening in this campaign. There really isn't any kind of foreign policy network that is supporting and advising Senator Sanders. I'll let him speak for himself. I think that what's important is this job requires you to be ready on all aspects of it on the first day. And we know we've got a particularly complex world right now. And the President's not going to have the time.
Maybe previous presidents in past years could have a little more leeway because of the, you know, way the world functioned. But now it's North Korea with its missile tests, it's Russian aggression, it's enforcing the Iran agreement. You have to do it all at once.
Chuck of course prefers to talk about the horserace, and Clinton obliged him there. She emphasized she has a lot of relevant experience, which she certainly does. But there is nothing in that issue that tells Democratic voters and I'll use that experience to accomplish things you want to see done.
CHUCK TODD:
Do you think the Iraq vote should still matter to voters?
SEC. HILLARY CLINTON:
Look, I think that voters are perfectly free to take into account anything they want to take. But I also hope they'll take the rest of the record. You know, I was involved in the biggest counterterrorism decision in the Obama administration, to determine whether or not to go after bin Laden. I did put the sanctions on Iran to get them to the negotiating table. I think that this is a debate that the voters really have to pay attention to, because it is choosing both a president and a commander-in-chief.
That part was a decent pitch. Although adding some criticism of what a mess Dick Cheney and Shrub Bush made of the Iraq War would have also fitted well here. And she's implicitly ceding that she has no regrets about her vote for the Iraq War. The questioning continued:
CHUCK TODD:
I'm curious. Do you believe if it wasn't for the Iraq War, we wouldn't have ISIS today?
SEC. HILLARY CLINTON:
Well, I think that's a hard conclusion to draw, because remember, we had Al Qaeda before we had ISIS. Al Qaeda attacked us in New York, Al Qaeda attacked our embassies in Africa.
CHUCK TODD:
But the argument is that the instability in Iraq is what has created this. And that if Saddam Hussein were still there, we wouldn't have ISIS.
SEC. HILLARY CLINTON:
Well, I think that's a lot of jumps in logic that to me doesn't really add up. The Iraq War, there's no doubt contributed to instability. I'm not going to in any way deny that. But you cannot draw a direct line. What you can do is to say that jihadist terrorism, starting with Al Qaeda, and moving onto its latest incarnations, most particularly ISIS, is in response to a number of forces in factors that are roiling up the Middle East and certainly fighting for what Islam means and how it's going to be presented and what people are going to mean when they talk about it. So yeah, we've got a much bigger set of problems. [my emphasis]
This is an odd answer, which also passes up a chance to blame the Cheney-Bush Administration for the gigantic cock-up the Iraq War became. But by virtually all accounts, the group now known as ISIS/ISIL/Daesh was an outgrowth of the Sunni militias that formed during the civil war after the Shi'a majority in Iraq took power. Yeah, it's a complicated thing. But to Democratic primary voters, it sounds like she's trying to defend the same kind of excessive hawkishness that led her to vote for the Iraq War in 2002.
So, if Clinton is asked about Wall Street, what would an appealing answer for Democratic primary voters be? I would guess it would be something along the lines of the Obama Administration accomplished and lot in bank regulation but there's more we need to do to protect the economy and ordinary depositors and investors. And with my experience I can get those changes enacted.
CHUCK TODD:
All right, another thing I wanted to follow up on the debate, Senator Sanders called the entire business model of Wall Street a fraud. We didn't get a chance to ask you to respond directly to that critique. I'd like to ask you to respond to it now.
SEC. HILLARY CLINTON:
Well, I think it's the kind of extreme statement that once you really take a hard look at it, it's hard to understand. You know, when you talk about Wall Street, are we talking about every bank or are we talking about a particular part of New York? That's never really clarified. What I believe is that there are good actors and bad actors in every part of our economy.
The job of the president is to weed out and prevent the bad actors from disrupting economic activity from amassing too much power and influence. But we live in a complex, global economy where we've got to have a good banking system that is able to service the American economy. And it needs to be more than just looking at the five banks that are the big banks.
We have to have a much more robust community banking system, regional banking system, other forms of credit access. And that's what I am advocating for. And I still do not understand why I'm having this problem getting Senator Sanders to join me in going after what are the potential problems that are out there, the shadow banking sector, and the investment and hedge fund sector. [my emphasis]
Why not lead with that last part? It fits well with the "I'm more progressive than Bernie" line of attack. But it steps on the "Bernie is an extremist" pitch.
But where in the world does a statement come from like: "You know, when you talk about Wall Street, are we talking about every bank or are we talking about a particular part of New York? That's never really clarified." At least since the days of the Populists in the late 19th century, "Wall Street" has been a staple phrase for those in both parties criticizing the forces of concentrated wealth. What she said there was a silly comment, one that reinforces the idea that she wants to minimize the problems created by "Wall Street."
From the trusty Encyclopædia Britannica's entry on Wall Street:
Even before the American Civil War the street was recognized as the financial capital of the nation. The Wall Street, or financial, district contains the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE Amex Equities, investment banks, government and municipal securities dealers, trust companies, the Federal Reserve Bank, many headquarters of utilities and insurance companies, and the International Cotton, Coffee, Sugar, Cocoa, and Commodity Exchanges. The district is the headquarters of many of the country’s brokerage firms.
Wall Street is a worldwide symbol of high finance and investment and, as such, has entered modern mythology. To 19th-century Populists, Wall Street was a symbol of the rapacious robber barons who exploited farmers and labourers. In prosperous times Wall Street has symbolized the route to quick riches. After the devastating stock market crash of 1929, Wall Street seemed the bastion of financial manipulators able to destabilize national economies. [my emphasis]
But Hillary Clinton is asking us to believe she's confused about whether Bernie Sanders means the physical street when he talks about Wall Street?
This from MTP also reinforces the notion of Clinton as overly friendly to "Wall Street":
HILLARY CLINTON:
Yes, there is, there is.
CHUCK TODD:
Six of the last Treasury secretaries either came from Wall Street or went to Wall Street after. I think there certainly right now isn't an appetite for somebody from Wall Street to be the next Treasury secretary. And yet, can you have a Treasury secretary if they don't understand Wall Street?
SEC. HILLARY CLINTON:
Well, you have to have a Treasury secretary who understands the economy, the American economy and the global economy. I think there are a lot more places where one can and should look for such a Treasury secretary.
CHUCK TODD:
Do you think you can pick one without having them have a Wall Street background?
SEC. HILLARY CLINTON:
Well, you know, I want somebody who can make a good commitment to work with me to get the economy moving, to get more good jobs created, to get incomes rising, to look out over the horizon at some of the economic problems that are out there. We've got to figure out what we're going to do with China.
You know, China is finally having to come to grips with the fact that a lot of its growth may have not been as on a firm foundation as we would hope. So we need people in government who have that kind of commitment and understanding. But we've got to put the needs of the American economy first. And that's going to be my commitment.
Not only does she soft-pedal her just-stated desire to do more on bank regulation than Bernie does. She hems and haws on the need for a Treasury Secretary independent of the financial industry. Even a Republican would be expected to claim with a straight face they wanted a Treasury Secretary who wasn't owned heart and soul by the industry.
And it would have been easy to both praise the accomplishments of the current Democratic Administration on the economy, which talking about the need "to get the economy moving" doesn't exactly do.
CHUCK TODD:
Before I let you go, I want to ask you about a comment. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said a comment that I've heard her say before. But it sort of rang differently to a lot of people. She said, "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help women." The implication is that somehow, if you're a Democratic woman and you're not supporting you, what's wrong with you? Do you want the vote to be decided on gender lines?
SEC. HILLARY CLINTON:
Oh look, you know, as you remember, Madeleine has been saying this for many, many years.
CHUCK TODD:
Right, Starbucks cups I think had it on there. I get that.
SEC. HILLARY CLINTON:
She believes it firmly. And in part, because she knows what a struggle it has been. And she understands the struggle is not over. So I don't want people to be offended by what she is expressing as her very--
CHUCK TODD:
Do you understand why some might have been offended by it?
SEC. HILLARY CLINTON:
Well good grief, we're getting offended by everything these days. Honest to goodness, I mean, people can't say anything without offending somebody. She has a life experience that I respect. I admire her greatly. And I think what she was trying to do, what she's done in every setting I've ever seen her in going back 20 plus years, was to remind young women, particularly, that you know, this struggle, which many of us have been part of, is not over. And don't be in any way lulled by the progress we've made. And I think it was a light-hearted, but very pointed remark, which people can take however they choose. [my emphasis]
Albright's comment sounded like she was saying women should vote for Clinton just because she's a woman. And how hard would it have been to say, well, I might have preferred she phrase that in a somewhat different way but ... and then proceed to give her explanation of how Albright typically expresses her strong support for women's right in those terms.
And what is the comment "Well good grief, we're getting offended by everything these days. Honest to goodness, I mean, people can't say anything without offending somebody" but a half-baked attempt to show she's not bound by "political correctness"? Which sounds like the DLC/"Sister Souljah moment"/triangulation approach that Democratic base voters don't want to hear from their Presidential candidate.
And if you want to convince Democratic voters you might become the scourge of Wall Street, having your husband make this kind of case on your behalf (Amanda Terkel, Bill Clinton Accuses Bernie Sanders Of Living In A 'Hermetically Sealed Box'Huffington Post 02/07/2016): "'Hillary's opponent has a different view,'" Clinton said, declining to mention Sanders by name. 'It's a hermetically sealed box. It's very effective. The system is rigged against you by the big banks, and both parties are in the thrall of the big banks. Anybody who takes money from Goldman Sachs couldn't possibly be president.'"
And as cautious as one has to be about alleged Clinton scandals, it's entirely legitimate for the Sanders campaign to raise questions about donors' influence on Hillary Clinton. Simon Head looks at those issues in The Clinton SystemNYR Daily 01/30/2016. And it's not just Goldman Sachs, either. Head writes:
The record of the Clinton System raises deep questions about whether a Hillary Clinton presidency would take on the growing political influence of large corporate interests and Wall Street banks. The next president will need to address critical economic and social issues, including the stagnating incomes of the middle class, the tax loopholes that allow hedge-funders and other members of the super-rich to be taxed at lower rates than many average Americans, and the runaway costs of higher education. Above all is the question of further reform of Wall Street and the banking system to prevent a recurrence of the behavior that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-2008.
So far, Hillary Clinton has refused to commit herself to a reintroduction of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which Bill Clinton allowed to be repealed in 1999 on the advice of Democrats with close ties to Wall Street, including Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. The reintroduction of Glass-Steagall, favored by Bernie Sanders, would prevent banks from speculating in financial derivatives, a leading cause of the 2007-2008 crash. With leading Wall Street banks so prominent in the Clintons’ fundraising streams, can Hillary Clinton be relied upon to reform the banks beyond the modest achievements of the Dodd-Frank bill of 2010? [my emphasis]
One of sources Head cites is this article from last year on the Clintons' very lucrative corporate speaking business: Andrew Perez, Firms Paid Bill Clinton Millions As They Lobbied Hillary ClintonInternational Business Times 04/28/15. It's worth stressing that although such fees and the contributions to the Clinton Foundation are legal, they can still have great influence on policy.
Even though I think every vote for Bernie pushes Clinton in the right direction policy-wise and I'd like to see him be the nominee, I'd also like to see Hillary get into more of a fighting-the-Republicans mood than the kind of Beltway chatter she showed in her MTP appearance.
I can only join in the general appreciation on the Democratic side for Bill Clinton's convention address in Charlotte last night. Al Gore commenting immediately afterward on Current TV said he thought it was the best Clinton speech he'd ever heard. And that's saying a lot.
I especially like the part where he defends Medicare and Medicaid and refuted the Romney-Ryan-Republican lie about how Obama's projected savings of $716 billion from benefit enhancements amounted to theft from the Social Security Trust Fund. Defending Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are the strongest issues the Democrats could use against the current Republican ticket, and Clinton on Wednesday showed them how.
I've gotten to the place where I cover my face with my hands whenever I hear a Democratic politicians start talking about The Deficit. And last night's Clinton speech was no different. But he gave about the best case I think anyone could while defending the Obama Administration's position on the deficit and debt. He focused on ridiculing Romney's phony "deficit-reduction" plan and pointing out that the more seriously they take the cuts, the more damaging they would be.
It's part of the general failure of our political elites - and those in the European Union - that during this depression they are committed to essentially conservative, austerity-oriented economics. But, as Clinton pointed out so well, putting the Republicans back in the White House would mean a return to the very policies that produced a lackluster jobs picture in the 2000s and were the immediate prelude and cause of the crash of 2007-8.
He also said something I’ve been screaming about, the fact that, if Romney-Ryan give back the $716 billion to subsidies for providers and insurance companies, then Medicare goes insolvent by 2016. This is a very nuanced argument that no Democratic politician has picked up on really at all. It happens to be true. And the consequences are that Romney and Ryan would have to make cuts to current seniors on Medicare, and the only ones they’ve outlined would be explicit cuts to benefits.
And Clinton also laid forth on Medicaid, in very clear language, explaining the importance of the program and the big difference between the two parties on this, with Democrats wanting to expand it as part of the Affordable Care Act, and Republicans wanting to block grant it and cut it by at least one-third. ...
Bill Clinton's not perfect, and the person he spent 46 minutes nominating is not perfect. That justification isn't perfect – there are in fact ways to have spurred better economic performance than we got, for now and for the future. Hint: it has to do with the banks.
And I could point-by-point a lot more. But I want to say this. The legacy of clear, explanatory information about policy, about what people sent to Washington do, how they do it, and what it means for you, should not end with Bill Clinton. It’s important for engaging people with their government.
Number One: Bill Clinton. At least 300 electoral votes. Against anyone. Tomorrow.
Number Two (and I say this as delicately as I possibly can): I would crawl on my knees naked through four miles of crushed glass just to listen, on a bad radio, to a debate between Bill Clinton and the zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan.
Number Three: Any reporter who complained about the length of that speech has no soul. There weren't four non-media people in the hall who wouldn't have sat there for another 15 minutes. I even didn't object — much — when Clinton started talking about The Deficit and shilling for the non-existent "Simpson-Bowles Plan." (There was no plan, I tell you!) There was as complete a merger of speaker and audience as you are ever going to see. More than any politician of the age, Bill Clinton inhabits a room and, at the same time, envelops it within himself. He breathes it in like oxygen.
Digby, who has been focused as well as anyone - better than pretty much everyone else, actually - on Obama's commitment to the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in exchange for essentially symbolic concessions from the Republicans strikes a more skeptical note in Tax collectors for the austerity stateHullabaloo 09/06/2012: "President Clinton's biggest dud of an applause line last night was when he mentioned Simpson-Bowles. It was stone cold silent in the room." That's really good news that not even the convention delegates in the middle of a world-class speech by the Big Dog were pretending to want to hear about that travesty of an austerity plan. "This won't win any votes outside the Village," she says, and she's dead right about that.
But what's really made [Clinton] that "referee" figure is the fact that the right wingers have rehabilitated him as a way to show contrast with Obama. It's been hilarious to watch them fawn over a man they impeached and then sit in stunned disbelief when he once again comes out on top. It's been the pattern with him from the beginning and it's what drives them nuts. He seduces them too.
And, I confess, I have a soft spot for him for that reason. He provokes them so much and yet they can't help but fall under his spell. Watching Fox News pundits have apoplexy last night after they spent the past week cynically building Clinton up was undeniably enjoyable.
The purpose of opposition parties in democracies is to oppose. At least in theory. At least the Republicans in the United States take that role very seriously. To the point that even when they are in power they still think like an opposition party.
Robert Perry last year in A Method to Republican 'Madness"Consortium News 03/31/2010 gives a history of Republican determination to sabotage Democratic Administrations going back to Lyndon Johnson's: "Whenever a Democrat is in the White House, the Republicans believe they are free [to] do whatever they want to block him from solving national problems, making him look weak and ineffectual." Never in the period have they had a Democratic President so willing to actively cooperate in the crippling of his own Administration and the possible destruction of his own Party. But their basic script isn't new.
As he notes, the Gingrich Republicans went after President Bill Clinton relentlessly with the goals of "tearing down a Democratic president and creating a sense of political havoc." And, today, from Washington to Wisconsin to Florida to California, we see the Republicans attempting the same approach.
This is quite an interesting presentation by Bill Clinton at the Davos World Economic Forum last week. At around 29:30, he says, "I think what America needs as much as anything else is to stop conducting its politics in a parallel universe divorced from reality with no facts."
At around 35:00 and following, he elaborates on what he means by a "parallel universe". He's very critical of the way the Democratic Party handled the Congressional campaign of 2010.
Bill Clinton was good, as everyone should have expected. The best part of his speech to me was that he attacked the Republicans directly on the torture policy. As did John Kerry and Gen. Claudia Kennedy in her brief presentation after Kerry's speech. This is a critical issue. It's a major disgrace to the country that it has become a partisan issue. But it is. The Republican Party supports torture with virtual unanimity. The Democratic Party opposes it. We won't hear similar statements in opposition to torture at next week's Republican Party convention. It's a true national disgrace.
My favorite Clinton line was, "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power." That's heresy to war-loving Republicans. But it's the attitude that normal people who don't have seven houses generally take.
This was also great section of the Big Dog's presentation:
American families by the millions are struggling with soaring health care costs and declining coverage. I will never forget the parents of children with autism and other severe conditions who told me on the campaign trail that they couldn’t afford health care and couldn’t qualify their kids for Medicaid unless they quit work or got a divorce. Are these the family values the Republicans are so proud of? What about the military families pushed to the breaking point by unprecedented multiple deployments? What about the assault on science and the defense of torture? What about the war on unions and the unlimited favors for the well connected? What about Katrina and cronyism?
America can do better than that. And Barack Obama will. [my emphasis]
Kerry gave a conventional liberal Democratic speech. What he said was fine by me. But his criticisms of McCain's changing positions was undercut by his using the "for it before he was against it" line that the media and the Reps used against him in 2004. Kerry was wagging his finger at McCain for playing Karl Rove politics. But that's the wrong response. (More thoughts on that below.)
Still, Kerry had good things to say:
Never in modern history has an administration squandered American power so recklessly. Never has strategy been so replaced by ideology. Never has extremism so crowded out common sense and fundamental American values. Never has short-term partisan politics so depleted the strength of America’s bipartisan foreign policy.
George Bush, with John McCain at his side, promised to spread freedom but delivered the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. They misread the threat and misled the country. Instead of freedom, it’s Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban and dictators everywhere that are on the march. North Korea has more bombs, and Iran is defiantly chasing one.
Our mission is to restore America’s influence and position in the world. We must use all the weapons in our arsenal, above all, our values. President Obama and Vice President Biden will shut down Guantanamo, respect the Constitution, and make clear once and for all, the United States of America does not torture, not now, not ever.
We must listen and lead by example because even a nation as powerful as the United States needs some friends in this world. We need a leader who understands all our security challenges, not just bombs and guns, but global warming, global terror and global AIDS. And Barack Obama understands there is no way for America to be secure until we create clean energy here at home, not with a little more oil in five, 10 or 20 years, but with an energy revolution starting right now. [my emphasis]
Tammy Duckworth made good points about the Iraq War, too:
In Barack Obama, our troops will have a commander-in-chief who has the judgment to use them wisely, sending them into harm’s way as a last resort, not a first resort; who listens to intelligence, doesn’t exaggerate it; who will bring our troops home from Iraq responsibly, not keep them there indefinitely; who knows that torture is not only morally repugnant, it’s militarily ineffective. It doesn’t work. It puts our troops at risk. It endangers our national security.
In Barack Obama, our military families will have a leader who will ease their burdens, ensure predictable deployments, offer more support to spouses back home and ensure military paychecks keep pace with the private sector. Our veterans will have a president who finally makes veterans’ benefits and health a priority, caring for their body, mind and spirit. [my emphasis]
It was good that they followed Clinton and Kerry up with the Iraq War video.
It's really good. It gives a straightforward account of the real-life situation in Iraq. It focuses on the experiences of US soldiers. And without beating anyone over the head with it, the film says the reality of the Iraq War is very different than the pretty lies McCain tells about it.
The most encouraging thing about Wednesday night's convention for me was that the Dems made an issue of the Cheney-Bush-McCain torture policy and made the Iraq War a central issue. Whatever the political effect, those are vital issues and they need to be addressed right.
Beau Biden's story about his father being sworn in for the Senate at his hospital bedside when he was severely hurt in the car accident that killed his mother and sister was incredibly moving.
He opened by defending the Constitution against Dark Lord Dick Cheney. His personal story was well delivered. The part about his mother sending him back outside to bloody the nose of the bullies was a welcome bit in the context of this Presidential election.
Biden opened his story about how Obama has an all-American personal story by observing, "John McCain doesn't seem to get it" when it comes to understanding the economic needs of ordinary working people.
I'm was getting concerned that I hadn't heard much at the convention so far going at McCain in a way that would jar his "maverick" image. Both Clintons did the ritual nod to McCain's brilliant service. But then he followed it up with vague invocations of how his policies are worse than Obama's. Biden did a version of it. But he followed it up with a long peroration on the theme of, "That's not change, that's more of the same." I thought his best hits on the following points:
John McCain is my friend. We’ve known each other for three decades. We’ve traveled the world together. It’s a friendship that goes beyond politics. And the personal courage and heroism John demonstrated still amaze me.
But I profoundly disagree with the direction that John wants to take the country. For example, John thinks that during the Bush years “we’ve made great progress economically.” I think it’s been abysmal.
And in the Senate, John sided with President Bush 95 percent of the time. Give me a break. When John McCain proposes $200 billion in new tax breaks for corporate America, $1 billion alone for just eight of the largest companies, but no relief for 100 million American families, that’s not change; that’s more of the same.
Even today, as oil companies post the biggest profits in history—a half trillion dollars in the last five years—he wants to give them another $4 billion in tax breaks. But he voted time and again against incentives for renewable energy: solar, wind, biofuels. That’s not change; that’s more of the same.
Millions of jobs have left our shores, yet John continues to support tax breaks for corporations that send them there. That’s not change; that’s more of the same.
He voted 19 times against raising the minimum wage. For people who are struggling just to get to the next day, that’s not change; that’s more of the same.
And when he says he will continue to spend $10 billion a month in Iraq when Iraq is sitting on a surplus of nearly $80 billion, that’s not change; that’s more of the same.
The choice in this election is clear. These times require more than a good soldier; they require a wise leader, a leader who can deliver change—the change everybody knows we need. [my emphasis]
This section expanded more on the national-security theme:
As we gather here tonight, our country is less secure and more isolated than at any time in recent history. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has dug us into a very deep hole with very few friends to help us climb out. For the last seven years, this administration has failed to face the biggest forces shaping this century: the emergence of Russia, China and India as great powers; the spread of lethal weapons; the shortage of secure supplies of energy, food and water; the challenge of climate change; and the resurgence of fundamentalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the real central front against terrorism.
In recent days, we’ve once again seen the consequences of this neglect with Russia’s challenge to the free and democratic country of Georgia. Barack Obama and I will end this neglect. We will hold Russia accountable for its actions, and we’ll help the people of Georgia rebuild.
I’ve been on the ground in Georgia, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and I can tell you in no uncertain terms: this Administration’s policy has been an abject failure. America cannot afford four more years of this.
Now, despite being complicit in this catastrophic foreign policy, John McCain says Barack Obama isn’t ready to protect our national security. Now, let me ask you: whose judgment should we trust? Should we trust John McCain’s judgment when he said only three years ago, “Afghanistan—we don’t read about it anymore because it’s succeeded”? Or should we trust Barack Obama, who more than a year ago called for sending two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan?
The fact is, al-Qaida and the Taliban—the people who actually attacked us on 9/11—have regrouped in those mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan and are plotting new attacks. And the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff echoed Barack’s call for more troops.
John McCain was wrong. Barack Obama was right. [my emphasis]
I have big, big reservations about the Obama-Biden policy on escalating in Afghanistan. But for the election, it's the policy the Democrats are stuck with.
And Biden bloodied the bullies' noses tonight.
Still, the campaign needs to hit McCain in ways that not only tie him to Bush and his disastrous policies. But they also need to do it in a way to address more personal and "character" issues. McCain is old and clearly confused on some important things. He's impulsive and hot-headed. Combine that with his eagerness to go to war and it's genuinely scary. He's also so wealthy he's rolling in his wife's money no matter in which of their many houses they happen to be at a given moment.
And those ugly personal characteristics are visible in his policies. He wants to keep the Iraq War going for 100 years or longer. He wants to play chicken with Russia in the Caucuses over countries most Americans would have some trouble naming, much less spelling, when we have vitually no viable military options there. He wants to flush the nuclear anti-proliferation efforts with Russia. And he wants to go war with Iraq. But that together with his impulsiveness, his bad temper, and his stereotypical old-man nostalgia for war and the symbols of military glory and it's a really, really bad picture.
The wealthy old grouch wants to phase out Social Security! He's worse than out of touch. He's perfectly willing to toss the country he professes to love so profoundly right back into the 1920s, when being old meant for all but the very wealthy meant being poor, dependent and sick.
The Democrats need to make those points. And they need to keep the focus they had tonight on the Iraq War.
