My little politics blog

That idea - about Bill's predominance in her campaign foreshadowing how much he might influence her administration - really jumped out at me the first time I heard it the other day. It was one of those things that's right there, but I hadn't considered it. Who can deny that the man's ego blurs even his own judgement, and let run amok, could very well taint things writ large?

If people including the Clintons "are making false assertions," [Obama] said, he will aggressively set the record straight.

As for the campaign's overall tone, Obama said, "I don't feel like the candidates are getting bloodied up. This is good practice for me, so when I take on those Republicans I'll be accustomed to it."

I write this more out of sadness than anger. Bill Clinton's ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife's campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party. While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it's not fair - indeed, it's demeaning - for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama's anti-war position is a "fairy tale") or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it. Meanwhile, the attack ads being run in South Carolina by the Clinton camp which quote Obama as saying Republicans had all the ideas under Reagan, is disingenuous. For years, Bill Clinton and many other leading Democrats have made precisely the same point - that starting in the Reagan administration, Republicans put forth a range of new ideas while the Democrats sat on their hands. Many of these ideas were wrong-headed and dangerous, such as supply-side economics. But for too long Democrats failed counter with new ideas of their own; they wrongly assumed that the old Democratic positions and visions would be enough. Clinton's 1992 campaign - indeed, the entire "New Democratic" message of the 1990s - was premised on the importance of taking back the initiative from the Republicans and offering Americans a new set of ideas and principles. Now, sadly, we're witnessing a smear campaign against Obama that employs some of the worst aspects of the old politics.

Is Obama winning the spin war?

Greg Sargent thinks so. I think the spin war itself is a distraction from Obama's core message - of unifying change - and distracting from that is central to the Clintons' strategy. It seems to me that Obama needs to focus back on the case for his own candidacy, in particular, providing explicit concrete policy detail in his public presentation. The Clintons are running as prosaic general managers. Obama should not downplay his transformational potential or his broader themes. But in the battle for base voters, many people are not hearing specifics - on the economy, on healthcare, on taxes, on climate change. He has them. He needs to repeat them. With the same mind-numbing repetitiveness that the Clintons always deploy.

In spite of his long history with the Clintons, Craig is an adviser to Barack Obama's campaign. "Ninety-five per cent of it is because of my enthusiasm for Obama," he said last month, at his law office. "I really regard him as a fresh and exciting voice in American politics that has not been in my life since Robert Kennedy." In 1968, Craig, who is sixty-two, was campaigning for Eugene McCarthy when he heard a Bobby Kennedy speech at the University of Nebraska, and became a believer on the spot. Since then, Craig has not been inspired by any American President. As for the prospect of another Clinton Presidency, he said, "I don't discount the possibility of her being able to inspire me. But she hasn't in the past, and Obama has."

Inspiration is an underexamined part of political life and Presidential leadership. In its lowest, most common form, inspiration is simple charisma that becomes magnified by the media, as with Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. On rare occasions, however, a leader can become the object of an intensely personal, almost spiritual desire for cleansing, community, renewal?-for what Hillary, in a 1969 commencement speech at Wellesley, called "more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living." Somewhere between the merely great communicators and the secular saints are the exceptional politicians who, as Hillary put it then, "practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible."

Robert B. Reich, the Secretary of Labor in Clinton's first term, who now teaches at Berkeley, told me that he believes political inspiration to be "the legitimizing of social movements and social change, the empowering of all sorts of people and groups to act as remarkable change agents." Reich was once a close friend of both Clintons?-he met Hillary when they were undergraduates, and began a Rhodes Scholarship the same year as Bill?-but he has not endorsed a candidate, and he seems drawn to Obama, for the same reasons that attracted Craig. "Obama is to me very analogous to Robert Kennedy," Reich said. "The closer you got to him, the more you realized that his magic lay in his effect on others rather than in any specific policies. But he became a very important vehicle. He got young people very excited. He was transformative in the sense of just who he was. And a few things he said about social justice licensed people. Obama does all that, almost effortlessly."

These rival conceptions of the Presidency?-Clinton as executive, Obama as visionary?-reflect a deeper difference in how the two candidates analyze what ails the country. Obama's diagnosis is more fundamental: for him, the illness precedes the Bush years and the partisan deadlock in Washington, originating in a basic failure of politicians to bring Americans together. A strong hand on the wheel won't make a difference if your car is stuck in the mud; a good leader has to persuade enough people to get out and push. Whereas Clinton echoes Churchill, who proclaimed, "Give us the tools and we will finish the job," Obama invokes Lincoln, who said, "As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Peter Wehner served in the Bush White House until August, 2007, working for Karl Rove, the Administration's chief strategist. Wehner, who is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in Washington, said that, as a candidate, Hillary Clinton would provide a "much more target-rich environment" than Obama. Republicans wouldn't need to uncover new scandals; they would simply remind voters of the not so distant Clinton wars. "Certain regions of your brain are latent," Wehner said. "But if there's a word or a sound or a memory that you hear, that region of your brain lights up again. And I have a feeling that, with Bill and Hillary Clinton, there are latent regions of the brain that will light up, and, if the Democrats don't light it up, the Republicans will. And that is going to be Clinton fatigue." As for Obama, Wehner's only complaint is that he's a liberal: "I find him to be very impressive. He would be much more difficult for Republicans to handle. He has much more breakout potential."

Late last year, as the Democratic race was tightening, there was an argument within the Clinton camp over whether to go on the attack against Obama?-an argument won by the proponents. When I described to Greg Craig the Clinton campaign's skepticism toward the idea of transcending partisanship, he said, "You're getting to that five per cent of Hillary that I don't like?-which is to see in every corner a conspiracy or an opponent that must be crushed. Look at her comment ?'Now the fun part starts' "?-Clinton's announcement in Iowa that she would begin attacking Obama's record. "There is a quality of playing the embattled, beleaguered victim that I find unappealing and depressing."

If there's a flaw in Hillary Clinton's character which could keep her from becoming a successful President, or President at all, it is what Carl Bernstein, her best biographer, described to me as a tendency toward "subterfuge and eliding." In the deep and sympathetic portrait "A Woman in Charge," Bernstein's recent biography of Clinton, a constant theme is her fear of humiliation; as the daughter of a harsh, often cruel father, she learned early to conceal any weakness and, ultimately, to protect her very humanity from exposure. In the recent Las Vegas debate, when Clinton was asked to name a weakness, all she could come up with was her impatience to get things done.

"In her personal life, she's always seemed like she had something to hide," Dee Dee Myers, who was a top adviser on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, and who served as White House press secretary for the first two years of his Presidency, said. "She had a difficult father, and she spent a lot of time trying to create an image of a functional family when she could have just said, ?'It's my family.' The burden of perfection was upon her, and she carried it into her marriage. There's always this fear of letting people see what they already know."

A former Clinton Administration official explained his decision to support Obama by urging me to read the two candidates' autobiographies side by side. Obama's "Dreams from My Father," unlike Clinton's "Living History," he said, reveals a narrator who has struggled through difficult questions of identity and resolved them, and who, as a result, is comfortable not just with himself but with the complexity and contradiction of the world. "When I'm with her, I feel she wants to impress me," the former official said. "When I'm with him, I feel he wants to know what I have to offer him."

Pietrafesa said that Hillary's fear of public exposure was connected to those early years in Arkansas. "To be so humiliated, and ruthlessly," Pietrafesa said. "In Arkansas, she went to a place she wasn't welcomed, big time. Everything was wrong with her. She didn't paint her toenails when she wore sandals, she didn't look like a cocktail waitress when she dressed up. Everybody really felt they could insult her with impunity."

Clinton's instinct to fight back was honed in the rough world of Arkansas politics. Once, when the two couples were talking about policy matters, Danner proposed a way to offer retail discounts to Arkansas's substantial elderly population. To the astonishment of Danner and Pietrafesa, Hillary responded, "The last thing we need to do right now is something for folks who didn't vote for Bill." She had, Danner remembered, "this binary view of the world, a little like Bush's comment ?'You're with us or you're against us.' " In Pietrafesa's opinion, "Hillary needs enemies."

That year, Clinton began writing a book about children and society called "It Takes a Village." The thing that Washington insiders remember best about the book is Hillary's failure to thank Barbara Feinman, the writer hired by Simon & Schuster, the publisher, as a collaborator. The truth, though, is more complicated, and shows Hillary to be less a Machiavellian liar than a woman whose guardedness leads to self-sabotage.

[...]

It Takes a Village" appeared in January, 1996, with an acknowledgments page that mentioned nobody. Clinton had apparently given in to the urge to pay her ghostwriter back (as had Simon & Schuster, which considered withholding the last portion of Feinman's hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar fee but quickly relented). Clinton's omission aroused the enmity of powerful friends of Feinman's at the Washington Post, and journalists began covering the slight, their suspicions roused by Clinton's explanation that she had forgone names in the acknowledgments for fear of leaving someone out. Hillary's triumphant return to the public eye became another embarrassment. As with so many other Clinton scandals, the press framed the story in the worst possible light, and got its essence wrong, suggesting that Feinman had written the whole book and that Clinton had stolen the credit. Instead, Clinton had micromanaged every aspect of the book's development. The episode captures her habit of undermining herself, when the worst might have been averted by a little candor and grace?-a tendency that has reappeared in the past few weeks, as her campaign has responded to the shock of Obama's challenge.

Clinton associates expressed concern that Hillary's chief strategist and pollster was Mark Penn, the author of "Microtrends," who is closely associated with triangulation?-the cynical adoption of ideas from both sides of the political divide. And some of her actions in the Senate have had an air of opportunism; in 2005, for example, she co-sponsored a bill to criminalize flag-burning. The burden of Clinton's long and intensely public political career is that she can be faulted for both excessive caution and excessive zeal. A Clinton associate put it this way to Carl Bernstein: "I'm not sure I want the circus back in town."

In the New Hampshire cafeteria, Clinton couldn't quite make an individual connection, even when listening sympathetically to a woman in the crowd who said that she held down two jobs and still had trouble paying for her asthma medicine. When a man declared himself appalled by the Democrats' weak statements about terrorism at a televised debate, Clinton snapped, "I'm sorry you were appalled by it," and moved on. She wouldn't risk the loss of control that it might take to energize the room with humor or anger or argument, or the sort of spontaneous human touch that everyone who spends private time with her notices and likes. A number of people drifted away before she had finished.

The next morning, Obama was scheduled to appear before an overflow crowd at the opera house in Lebanon. When he walked onto the stage, which was framed by giant vertical banners proclaiming "HOPE," his liquid stride and handshake-hugs suggested a man completely at ease.

"I decided to run because of you," he told the crowd. "I'm betting on you. I think the American people are honest and generous and less divided than our politics suggests." He mocked the response to his campaign from "Washington," which everyone in the room understood to be Clinton, who had warned in the debate two nights before against "false hopes": "No, no, no! You can't do that, you're not allowed. Obama may be inspiring to you, but here's the problem?-Obama has not been in Washington enough. He needs to be stewed and seasoned a little more, we need to boil the hope out of him until he sounds like us?-then he will be ready."

The opera house exploded in laughter. "We love you," a woman shouted.

"I love you back," he said, feeding off the adoration that he had summoned without breaking a sweat. "This change thing is catching on, because everybody's talking about change. ?'I'm for change.' ?'Put me down for change.' ?'I'm a change person, too.' "

A few hours before Clinton's rally in Hampton, I watched John McCain's masterly presentation before a packed middle-school gym in Salem, which included many skeptics and independents. An accountant challenged him on his willingness to make Bush's tax cuts permanent while claiming to be a deficit hawk, telling McCain, "You're in Purgatory." The candidate shot back playfully, "Thank you very much. It's a step up from where I was last summer." He was witty, combative, humble, and blunt (while embracing Republican orthodoxy on almost every position). Unlike Clinton, he engaged questioners in lengthy back-and-forths that showed he was capable of a respectful disagreement. After hearing Clinton that evening, I thought that she might have a hard time beating McCain in November.

"Hillary needs to connect two things," Myers said. "What's in her heart and what she wants to accomplish and why. There are many reasons to think she'd be a good President. She knows what she wants to do, she understands how the process works, she's shown an ability to work with Congress, she's become more incrementalist. But the Presidency isn't all that powerful, except as the bully pulpit. It comes down to your ability to get people to follow you, to inspire. You have to lead. Can she get people to come together, or does she remain such a polarizing figure? That's what the campaign will be about." In other words, winning the Presidency might require Clinton to transcend her own history.

But when candidates tell the kinds of lies that the Clintons have been telling, they place citizens in a position in which the only way to know what is going on is to become political junkies. Being merely informed is not enough: you have to be the sort of person who actually remembers the article from 2004 that Bill Clinton was referring to when he said that Obama had changed his position on the war, and so forth.

It's like the tobacco companies' attempts to confuse people by coming up with research that seemed to show that smoking was harmless. The strategy is to sow enough doubt that people who are not willing to slog through the science, the interminable debates about the methodological deficiencies of this or that study, etc., etc., etc., are likely to come away with a vague sense that the case that smoking is bad isn't all it's cracked up to be. It is designed to leave people with two options: either spend an awful lot of time working through the science, or be misled. In so doing, it asks a lot of ordinary people who have lives to lead: it prevents them from just reading stuff, forming a more or less correct view, and acting accordingly. And it is deeply wrong.

Likewise here: the Clintons' strategy seems to be designed to leave people with two options: either become political junkies, follow every tiny detail of all these stories, and make up your minds on the merits, or not, in which case you will be left with a vague sense that Obama is not all he should be -- a sense that is wholly unsupported by the facts.

This is also sort of what I was getting at in the "polls" thread about "safer." It's not about intelligence per se (and I was uncomfortable with where Cycloptichorn was going, there), but how much patience people have to wade through stuff vs. going the safer route.

Very, very good (post? article? column?) from Hilzoy, again (the fishin'-avatar-guy).

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/01/lies-and-democr.html

It has a really good collection of debunkings, along with analysis. I thought this was particularly good/ well-stated:


Hilzoy adds later:

Quote:

All I want to say is if Hillary gets the nomination, the democrats will lose the election. I just want the Clintons to go away, they had their turn and it is time for somebody new

Also I am disgusted that an ex-president is campaigning this way, generally they deserve respect but Bill Clinton is changing that, he does not have my respect.

I couldn't agree more, especially the last part.

That wasn't about identity politics, it was that it was swerving close to "poor people are stupid."

I'll go into it more there, though.

One is reminded of McCain's defeat in South Carolina in 2000. Clinton must sorely regret that she can't use proxies to pointedly accuse Obama of fathering a black child ?- because, after all, he has two of them, and they are adorable.

Republican perspective, interesting in a few different ways; "Where is the Republican Obama?"

http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/01/25/james-republican-obama-oped-cx_pja_0125james.html