All the talk about how rough the Democratic presidential race is becoming is absurd. Considering that Hillary Rodham Clinton is running to restore the personalities and policies of the 1990s to the White House, it is astonishing how gentle the debate has been.Imagine if at the next presidential debate Barack Obama — who is agitated about what he calls Bill Clinton’s misleading criticisms — cocked his head, smiled ruefully and, in Reaganesque “there you go again” tones, said something like this to Hillary Clinton: “You know, I admired some aspects of Bill Clinton’s presidency. But let’s recall that it was precisely these sort of too-cute-by-half statements that caused him to be reprimanded by a federal judge and stripped of his law license. Senator, you may want to go back to those days and that style of politics, but I think most Americans are ready to move on.”A politician who claims he is ready to lead the Democrats into the next decade won’t get there until he figures out how to navigate the most skilled politician of the last decade.Had you forgotten that Bill Clinton voluntarily agreed in the closing hours of his presidency to be disbarred and pay a sizable fine in the fallout from the Monica Lewinsky scandal?
No doubt most Democrats have forgotten — which is testament to both Clintons’ indefatigable talent for framing political debates on their terms, rather than those of their opponents.
Obama’s strategists would probably say that engaging a popular former president in such a direct manner might backfire. But recent days would suggest that Obama’s alternative is also backfiring.
He has wandered into a tactical battle — over who is behind what radio ads or robocalls, or over the correct interpretation of stray quotes — with the best tactical politicians in the business. The Clintons have assembled a team that has thought through plausible defenses to virtually every vulnerability. They turned the practice of fast and forceful response into an art form.
Meanwhile, Obama has confronted the strategic question — do the Clintons represent the Democrats’ best chance of returning to power and successfully governing? — in a glancing, tentative fashion.
His vague, spacious rhetoric hardly indicates he has a coherent critique of the Clinton administration or clear ideas about his own alternative. Here is an area where his appeals to a new style of politics could stand more substance.
Bill Clinton’s admirers are right that he has done more good for Democrats than any politician of his generation. He was elected twice, turned back Newt Gingrich’s effort to dismantle large parts of the federal government, and neutralized welfare, crime, the budget deficit and other issues that had tormented his party.
It is true, as he said the other day, that the record is “pretty good — people [were] better off at the end than when I started.”
But it’s also true that Bill Clinton has done more to hurt Democrats than any other politician.
His missteps, with the full assistance of Hillary Clinton, propelled Republicans into power in Congress for 12 years.
And his personal scandals and wearying style of politics propelled George W. Bush into power in an election Al Gore should have won. (Bill Clinton does not believe this, but — more convincingly — most Bush strategists do.)
Obama was on to something in his now-controversial quote to the Reno Gazette-Journal that Ronald Reagan transformed politics in a way that the Clintons (so far) have not. Reagan stood for a handful of large ideas and managed to command large majorities behind his leadership.
His ideas have proven significantly more durable and desirable with Republicans than Clinton’s have with Democrats.
Clinton stood for skillful improvisation, invoking many different ideas, some of which were in tension with one another, in a battle for political survival that lasted until his last day in office (and continues now on behalf of his wife and his own legacy).
Obama, however, has flinched from making his Reagan argument in the way that would be required to convince Democrats — by actually making a case about what the Clintons did and did not do the last time they held executive power.
Hillary Clinton has been the beneficiary of Obama’s failure to engage. She has turned the health care reform debacle of the 1990s into an advantage by talking vaguely about how she “wears the scars” of that effort and has returned older but wiser.
But she has never been pressed on the details of that effort — how it was not simply Republicans and insurance companies but senior officials within the Clinton administration such as Lloyd Bentsen and Donna Shalala who recoiled at the process she ran.
Health care is not the only blemish on her decision-making record.
Obama has never insisted that she explain her record in an area in which she had virtually unchallenged authority — staffing the legal apparatus of the first-term Clinton administration.
Hillary Clinton’s decisions led to the appointment of Bernard Nussbaum as White House counsel (fired after a year), and former Rose Law Firm partner Webster Hubbell as a top Justice Department official (forced to resign and later sent to prison).
These colossal misjudgments about personnel should hardly be the sole basis for judging potential as an executive. But they are more relevant than subjects Obama has raised, such as her service in the 1980s on the board of directors of Wal-Mart.
What’s more, it is almost delinquent of Clinton’s Democratic opponents not to ventilate this history and make Clinton defend it before she faces a general election.
As she taunted Obama the other day, “The Republicans are not going to have any compunctions about asking anybody anything.”
For now, however, it is the Clintons who are on offense and Obama who seems flummoxed in a way that Newt Gingrich would have found familiar. Little wonder that Obama snapped at New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny when he asked, “Are you allowing President Clinton to get in your head?”
Barack Obama
No comments:
Post a Comment