Thank You Hillary - Democratic Underground

Time for change

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Tue Aug-12-08 04:00 PM
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Thank You Hillary

Hillary Clinton was near the bottom of my choices for President among the 2008 Democratic candidates.

Worst of all was what I perceived as negative campaigning against Obama on her part. The worst example of that was when she said that John McCain has more experience than Obama for the Job of Commander-in-Chief – a statement that could be taken by some as saying that McCain is more qualified for President than Obama. True enough, McCain does have more experience than Obama in certain respects. So does George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But to emphasize McCain’s greater experience compared to Obama, without simultaneously noting that Obama’s judgment is far superior to McCain’s was almost unforgivable in my opinion.

But enough of that. The recent revelations about the internal workings of Hillary’s campaign have caused me to reassess this issue and see her in a much more positive light. Mark Allen’s Politico article (which discusses a forthcoming article in The Atlantic), titled “Clinton told to portray Obama as foreign”, attempts to portray the Clinton campaign as disorganized and ineffective. What is the basis for that portrayal? Mainly that her campaign was plagued by conflicting advice among her top advisors, much of which wasn’t acted upon. Oh my, how unusual for a political campaign!

The bottom line for Allen is that, after receiving advice from her top campaign strategist, Mark Penn, to go forward with a scorched earth campaign against Obama:

But no one synthesized and acted on the good advice… What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make.

Good advice? The only thing good about it, if you want to call it that, is that it may have represented Senator Clinton’s only chance of winning the Democratic nomination. That’s what she was told by her top campaign strategist, and it was probably true.

But at the same time it was a malicious, dishonest, and cynical strategy that would likely have destroyed the possibility of any Democrat winning the Presidency in 2008 and could have torn the Democratic Party apart. The fact that Hillary did not act upon that advice, in my opinion, should put the lie to the suggestion that she would do anything to win the Presidency. In retrospect then, her statement that John McCain has more experience for Commander-in-Chief than does Obama is largely overshadowed, in my view, by her decision to refuse to go with the abominable strategy that probably represented her one best chance of winning the nomination.

Mark Penn’s cynical strategy advice

Here is the gist of what Penn advised, from Allen’s article:

Penn suggested getting much rougher with Obama in a memo on March 30… “Does anyone believe that it is possible to win the nomination without, over these next two months, raising all these issues on him?...”

Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.” …

The Penn memo suggesting that the campaign target Obama’s “lack of American roots” said in part: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light… Let’s explicitly own ‘American’… He (Obama) doesn’t… Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.”

And that is the gist of what Hillary is being criticized for not putting into action, in Allen’s article.

What motivates articles like Allen’s column in Politico?

As far as I’m concerned, this is just one more right wing attack article. It accomplishes two purposes at once. First, it attempts to make Senator Clinton’s campaign, and by extension she herself, look incompetent. It implies that her failure to incorporate her chief campaign strategist’s advice into her campaign was a matter of incompetence rather than a principled decision. There is no basis for that assumption. A decision was made not to go with that cynical and destructive strategy. Or alternatively, no decision was made to go with it. What is the difference, and who could ever differentiate between the two with any certainty? Common sense suggests that it was a purposeful and principled decision.

Secondly, the article clearly implies that a racist campaign to paint Barack Obama as “un-American” would have been a “good” strategy for the Clinton campaign. In so doing, it implies a certain amount of legitimacy to such a campaign strategy. Undoubtedly, that will be the McCain campaign’s strategy. It has started already, and it is bound to get worse. Had Hillary gone with that strategy, she would have added a great amount of perceived legitimacy to the McCain campaign’s efforts along those lines. (And in addition, efforts to unite supporters of the Obama and Clinton camps would have been greatly undermined). That would have provided much fuel for the McCain campaign and greatly hurt Obama’s chances of winning the election.

Some thoughts on the race issue

Throughout most of the campaign season I saw Obama’s race as neither a positive nor a negative factor. I was an Edwards supporter. I considered much of Obama’s rhetoric to be too conservative for my tastes, and that bothered me.

But since Edwards dropped out of the race, and especially since Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee, I have come to fully support his candidacy. Mainly that is because his positions and judgment are so superior to McCain’s in almost every way.

Also, I now see the race issue in a positive rather than in a neutral light. Although there has been much improvement over time, our country is still way too racially divided. A successful Obama Presidency will do much to improve that situation. There is nothing as likely to reduce racism as much as familiarity with people of different races. One very large component of racism is simply fear of the unknown. A successful Obama Presidency will go a long way towards alleviating that.

In addition, an Obama Presidency holds the potential to substantially improve our standing in the world. After seven and a half hears of the Bush/Cheney nightmare, our standing and level of respect in the world has dropped to an all time low. We have a lot to make up for. Electing an African-American President could be a first step towards showing the world that Americans are not as racist as many suppose we are. A successful Obama presidency could do a tremendous amount towards restoring our standing in the world.

But make no mistake about it, our country is still plagued by racism, and that is bound to hurt Obama in this fall’s election. Nevertheless, Obama is such a superior candidate to McCain that he overcomes the race factor and more, such that he has been consistently well ahead of McCain in both national polls and in Electoral College analyses.

A recent incredibly stupid article, titled “7 worrisome signs for Obama”, lists race as the first “worrisome sign”. The article rightly notes that racism in our country probably hurts Obama’s chances. But it also admits that Obama has been polling even with McCain among white voters, compared to John Kerry who lost the white vote by 17 points, and Al Gore who lost the white vote by 12 points – both in very close elections. So how is race a “worrisome sign” for Obama when he as a black candidate is polling better among white voters than any Democratic candidate since the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 44 years ago?

Closing thoughts on Hillary Clinton and the 2008 Presidential race

Tensions can and usually do get very heated during political campaigns, even within parties. For me, the recent revelations of the campaign strategy advice that Senator Clinton received during this past primary season puts things into clearer perspective. What I once saw as unacceptably negative campaigning on her part now seems quite mild compared to what it could have been. Some might argue that I’m being too easy on her by using too low of a bar to compare her actions against. Nevertheless, in view of these revelations it should be quite clear that the charge that she would do anything to win the Presidency is absolutely false. I feel that she deserves credit for not going down that road. Thank you Hillary!

The biggest factor in my being against her nomination from the beginning was her relatively hawkish views on war, especially her Iraq War Resolution vote. Nevertheless, that too could be put into some perspective: All five 2004 and 2008 presidential candidates who were in the U.S. Senate when the IWR came up for voting (Clinton, Kerry, Biden, Dodd, and Edwards) voted for the Iraq War Resolution; Hillary Clinton has been one of a minority of U.S. Senators to support and vote for the cutting off of funds for continuing the occupation of Iraq; she was one of only 34 U.S. Senators to vote against the atrocious Military Commissions Act; during the Democratic debates she spoke forcefully for the need stop torturing our prisoners; and she was one of only 28 Senators to vote against the recent FISA Amendment that for the time being has largely destroyed our Fourth Amendment.

Senator Clinton can do a great deal to help Obama get elected President, thereby stopping cold a de facto third (and possibly fourth) term continuation of the Bush/Cheney nightmare. She seems more than willing to help, and we need her help. We also need the support of her supporters.

Under these circumstances I feel much better about the new perspective I now have on her campaign. Our corporate news media will do everything it can between now and November to make Obama look bad, shield McCain from his repeated inane statements, and divide Democrats. I for one am sick and tired of this pathetic excuse for journalism. Thank you, Hillary, for doing your part to fight against that effort.