The Clinton Drag

The last several days have seen alot of talk about Hillary Clinton's viability as the Democratic nominee for president. First, there were questions about whether she'd be a drag on the party. Then, people wondered if her First Lady experience is so important to her image of "being ready" for the White House, why wouldn't the documented evidence of her time there be available until after the election? Then, her attack dog Howard Wolfson blasted Obama's perfectly reasonable, objective, and even-tempered observation on her handicap as a divisive figure in politics, as being negative. What's behind this is much more than meets the eye. Hillary Clinton seems more and more every day like a modern Edward of Caernarvon, the inevitible and benign heir to the throne of a dying and hateful father, with their main qualification being that their spouses could rule. This is the result of our party having been tuned for survival and evasion over the last 40 years, rather than for combat. We've lost our ability to forecast a strategic advantage, and prepare for it. The national polls indicate that our nominees have a slight edge over GOP opponents, but it'll be close. What those polls don't account for is the tremendous malfunction in the conservative machine that gives us this opportunity to exploit a lack of enthusiasm in any GOP candidate.

It is important that we make the most of this opportunity. The Republican brain-trust will eventually find some new social minority to exploit for political gain. If they do this before we’ve established ourselves as the party that can carry poor and working class Americans into the global trade era, they will again rest on fear as their main political motivator.

Hillary is not the best candidate for these conditions. Her nomination and possible election would result in a failure on our part to move our platform into an economically progressive position that can block out right-wing exploitation in the electoral market. The formula is simple. Despite the tone of inevitability around her, she’s not our first choice for principled reasons, and she is the GOP’s for tactical reasons.

She’s not our first choice

In the debates, whenever Obama, Kucinich, or even Edwards and Dodd say something, it gets passionate applause. When Hillary says something, the applause is much more like the applause you give a football player who gets up off the ground after being knocked unconscious. As far as Democrats are concerned, she’s “our most viable candidate”, which isn’t true (I’ll go into why in the next section).

Voters and activists are not inspired by Clinton. The other four I mentioned each have their own corps of volunteers, to varying extents, who truly believe in their candidates. Hillary’s volunteers are more interested in beating the Republicans, and they’re subjugated to her political machine and its interests.

This disempowers and demotivates those grassroots activists brought back from the Nader camp by Dean and the DNC, whose participation has been key to recent state and local Democratic Party transformations. These changes are what made 2006 a big win, instead of just a slight advantage in the House, alone.

What’s more, her policies will shut the door on a public that’s ready to step back into our tent in a big way. Her defense of lobbyists and their effect on governing, her soft neo-con foreign policy (to include her vote to authorize military action in Iraq), her apparent abandonment of national health care as a priority (when it’s ready to make a big electoral impact), and her fundraising methods put her out of touch with activists and voters alike. And a couple of these will hurt with independents, whose focus on the integrity of the political process (as illustrated by the popularity of Perot in ’92). These all hurt the integrity and politics of the Party, both long-term and in 2008.

She is their first choice

Clinton angers the social conservatives, more as a result of her representation of the enemy in the culture wars than anything else. Right now, they’re completely uninspired by their own candidates and continue to search for something that will unify them. Hillary would do that. Even though they’re poised to stay home in 2008, not put out yard signs or go to rallies, thanks to Bush and the destruction of the GOP’s house of cards alliance, she would give them that motivation they need to turn out and work hard against us.

In this climate, we can have our first choice, because all of our candidates are electable (maybe not Mike “I-Wish-I-Were-McGovern-So-Much-It-Makes-Me-Mad” Gravel). That’s because of the fracturing of the GOP through its now evident self-contradiction. Populist economics is the secret to moving poor and working class whites back into our circle. She can’t do that, because her platform won’t be what it needs to be, and because they’ll be tempted to campaign against her. This hurts us all the way down the ticket if they come out to vote against her as the representative of our party.

All of this is illustrated in the recent warming between her and right-wing leadership. Murdoch and Kristol, among others, have found a niche application for Hillary. They get two things out of Hillary; 1) They aren’t in disagreement with her cloaked neo-conservatism on foreign policy, and can live with her winning, but will also be able to bash her to help reunite as an opposition party; 2) they have the chance to put someone relatively benign and agreeable, like Huckabee, in office to stem the impending judgment of the GOP before historians have completed their conviction of Bush. This gives them time to repair the fractures in the GOP.

Hillary Clinton’s nomination would be a costly fumble by our team. It would disincentivize participation in our party by those with the most political and moral resolve, and would provide the GOP with their much-needed dragon to slay. She is the best Republican candidate in the field right now, in that she is the best candidate for the GOP, and we have to treat her that way. To do anything else would leave us open to defeat in 2008 and beyond, in a time when we should be running the score up.