“The Fact That I Don’t Like Her Is Irrelevant”: Don’t Be Blinded By The Hillary Clinton Hologram
I argued last week that left-of-center pundits who are demanding someone in the Democratic Party pose a challenge to Hillary Clinton are not offering arguments. Instead, they are expressing anxiety. Fears, not reasons. They worry that Clinton won’t earn the party’s nomination, but instead seize it as a birthright, which runs afoul of liberal commitments to merit, competition, and fair play.
Because the Republicans have no such concern (despite Jeb Bush’s urging to the contrary), I argued that the stakes are too high for restarting debate over first principles. Unlike 2008, Hillary Clinton now stands alone with no significant opposition in sight. That may change, of course, but for now, she is the best choice for maintaining Barack Obama’s broad voting coalition and for protecting the hard-won progressive gains of the president’s administration.
It was a cold-blooded analysis, perhaps made colder by the fact that I wasn’t writing from the heart. I was instead writing as a voter, and voters must, I contend, try to pierce, as much as possible, through the “hologram” of American politics, as the late great populist Joe Bageant put it. So I’m getting in line behind the Democratic frontrunner even though I personally prefer a dialectic over values, issues, and ideals; even though I personally believe that ideological duels among like-minded partisans is healthy and good; and even though I personally dislike Hillary Clinton.
I realized this dislike in 1991 when I was 17 years old. Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was running for the nomination against Jerry Brown (who had been, and is once again, governor of California). Brown had accused Clinton of “funneling money to his wife’s law firm for state business.” Pressed to respond, his wife said: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.”
This comment is usually seen as an artifact of the “culture wars” and the “debate” over the legacy of second-wave feminism. But there’s more to it than that. At the heart of Clinton’s “cookies-and-tea” comment was a kind of rank classism that drove a wedge between voters who would otherwise find common ground in advancing mutually beneficial agendas. Labor is labor, whether done in public or in private, but the Ivy League-educated wife of a presidential up-and-comer was too elitist to see the truth of the matter. The result was stay-at-home mothers — like my own housekeeping mom — splitting from the Democrats and running into the waiting arms of GOP conservatives.
Even so, I believe Hillary Clinton would make a decent president, maybe even a good one, despite her elitism leaving a memorably bad taste in my mouth. People are usually surprised to hear that. They are surprised, I suspect, because the parties and the media, consciously and unconsciously, encourage voters to view candidates as if they were products — as a brand whose image embodies a vast web of psychological phenomena. This despite the fact that familiar candidates like Hillary Clinton are mere mortals whose views and policy positions have long been known. Even so, if you buy a product, the assumption is that you like it. And indeed, candidates have been “sold” to voters for decades. In The Selling of the President, a classic of the 1968 presidential election, the late journalist Joe McGinnis wrote that once politicians and ad men “recognized that the citizen does not so much vote for a candidate as make a psychological purchase of him, [it wasn’t] surprising that they began to work together.”
Since 1968, that profitable alliance has grown in size and sophistication. Anyone can see that. What we can’t see is our political blindness. As Joe Bageant put it, we don’t see the candidates; we see their “hologram.” “All things are purchasable, and indeed, access to anything of value is through purchase. Even mood and consciousness, through psychopharmacology, to suppress our anxiety or enhance sexual performance, or cyberspace linkups to porn, palaver, and purchasing opportunities. But most of all, the hologram generates and guides us to purchasing opportunities.”
The hologram draws much of its power from the fantastical desire for the perfect candidate. Case in point: Barack Obama. He was going to bring change to Washington. How wonderful! Though he did try, the president soon learned he could not transform politics as usual. No way. Indeed, the man who promised to overcome partisanship became, thanks to total Republican obstruction, a pure partisan.
Democratic voters must try to pierce through the Hillary Clinton Hologram, as much as they can, to see the person. The mere mortal. The flawed, maybe tragic, human being. The woman who once thought herself too good to bake cookies at home. She has baggage and can be found ideologically wanting. But none of that matters. What matters is that she’s a Democrat who will protect social-insurance programs, defend higher taxes on the wealthy, and continue peace talks with Cuba and Iran. And what matters is that her campaign has become a juggernaut that has the potential to roll over her Republican opponent.
In comparison, the fact that I don’t like her is irrelevant.
By: John Stoehr, The National Memo, April 29, 2015
“Maybe Unity Is The Last Thing Republicans Need”: We Love The Lord And Hate His Enemies
It’s the season for pandering to the base, which is as good a time as any to ask whether the glorious, fascinating mess that is today’s Republican Party can ever unify enough to win back the White House—or whether unity is something they should even be after. Because it may well be that a fractured, contentious GOP is the only kind that can prevail next November.
You probably missed it, but over the weekend nearly all the Republican presidential candidates (with the notable exception of Jeb Bush) hotfooted it back to Iowa to participate in the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition Forum, where they testified to the depths of their love for the Lord and their hatred for His enemies, particularly Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The entreaties to this band of the base—important in primaries everywhere, but critically so in Iowa, where 57 percent of the attendees at the Republican caucuses in 2012 identified as born-again or evangelical Christian—are a good reminder of the internal and external challenges the candidates face.
According to multiple reports, the biggest ovations were given to two candidates who are almost certainly not going to win the primaries: Bobby Jindal, who has already made clear that he wants to be the most sectarian candidate in the race, and Carly Fiorina, whose pitch many of the assembled probably hadn’t heard before. But Scott Walker, the son of a Baptist minister, was enthusiastically received as well. Walker’s message, the New York Times reported, “is that in an unusually fractured Republican field, with 10 or more candidates potentially on the ballot in the Iowa caucuses next year, he is best positioned to unite the party.”
And he may well be, since he is liked by everyone from evangelicals to Tea Partiers to the plutocrats waiting to anoint the candidates with a shower of cash. The problem is that if you haven’t ticked off some faction of the Republican Party, you’ve probably put yourself in a dangerous place for the general election.
Think about where Republican candidates have gotten in trouble within their party. Jeb Bush has been attacked for talking about undocumented immigrants with compassion, and Marco Rubio alienated many by seeking comprehensive immigration reform. Rand Paul ruffled feathers by questioning whether a return to Cheneyite foreign adventurism is really in America’s interests. Ted Cruz got criticized for attending a fundraiser at the home of two gay supporters. Rick Santorum (yes, he’s back) raised eyebrows by advocating an increase in the minimum wage.
What do all these little dissents and blasphemies have in common? In every case, the thing that the candidate did to upset Republican primary voters would make him more attractive to voters who aren’t Republicans—and the Republican nominee will need a healthy chunk of them to win. So the candidate who can unify the Republican Party may by definition be the one who will start the general election at a disadvantage.
Not that any candidate wants significant portions of his party disgruntled and disillusioned after a bitter primary campaign. But by next summer, unifying the party with real enthusiasm from all sides will probably mean proposing tax cuts for the wealthy, last-ditch opposition to marriage equality, an interventionist foreign policy, a crackdown on immigration, and doing nothing on climate change (among other things)—and doing so with the zeal of the true believer. That’s not a program likely to win many converts who aren’t already committed to the conservative cause.
The response that most Republicans are gravitating toward (which has been expressed most forcefully by Cruz and Walker) is that this isn’t really a problem at all, because capturing independent votes isn’t about lining up with them on issues, it’s about having confidence in your conservatism. It’s the kind of advice you can find in a hundred self-help books: Keep your chin up and your chest out, walk in like you own the room, give everyone a firm handshake and a hearty clap on the back, and they’ll be drawn to your powerful electoral charisma, with success inevitably to follow.
This argument has obvious appeal. It says that winning is about attitude, and requires no compromise on the things you (or the primary voters) find important; even if an independent voter disagrees with you, they’ll be so impressed by your firm gaze that they’ll rally to your side. And there’s some truth to it, at least insofar as voters don’t just tally up a checklist of issues and determine which candidate they agree with more.
The irony is that winning the primary is in significant part about issues. Primary voters are paying attention, and with so many candidates to choose from, they’ve got plenty of opportunities to eliminate some based on even one area of disagreement. Stray from what they want to hear, and you can be punished—and it won’t do much good to say that a year from now, independent voters might find precisely that heresy appealing.
So anyone who could be a uniter will also be a divider: Unite the party and you’ll put up a wall between yourself and the general electorate. In the right circumstances and from the right candidate, that wall might be low enough to leap over. But it might be better to leave behind at least a few bruised feelings and ideological doubts.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, April 27, 2015
“Hillary Clinton And The Burden Of Authenticity”: She Came, She Saw, She Talked, And She Listened
One of the funniest conversations I’ve heard took place among a small group of Arkansas women who’d done their best to clue the newlywed Hillary Rodham in on a basic fact of Southern life she’d been reluctant to accept in the 1970s: Cute counts. It’s not necessary to be a beauty queen, but a woman who doesn’t look as attractive as she can is often suspected of being too “authentic” for her own good.
The lady lumberjack look then fashionable on Ivy League campuses confused Arkansas voters, as did Hillary’s decision to keep her maiden name after marriage. (As the husband of a Southern girl often patronized to her face in a New England college town back then, I can testify that cultural incomprehension can run both ways. But that’s another topic.)
The point is that Hillary Rodham Clinton listened. As she later explained, she hadn’t really understood how strongly people in Arkansas felt about the name thing. So she took the name “Clinton” to stop sending a message she’d never intended. About the same time, it became fairly obvious that she’d started taking clothing, makeup, and hair-styling tips from female friends and quit looking like an outsider too.
So does that make her more or less “authentic” by current journalistic standards? Does it make her a big faker, the “manipulative, clawing robot” of a Maureen Dowd column? Or a relatively normal human being adjusting to the expectations of the people around her?
Not long afterward, Hillary also started doing something very much like what she’s recently been doing in Iowa and New Hampshire: holding small-scale town meetings with local school boards, parents, and teachers in support of the newly re-elected Bill Clinton’s Arkansas education reforms.
Clinton’s 1983 education package — its slogan was “No More Excuses” — brought math, science, and arts classes to many rural school districts for the first time. It raised teacher salaries and increased taxes to fund them. Over time, it’s helped close the historic gap between the state’s country and city schools.
And before the campaign was over, Arkansas’s First Lady was on a first-name basis with thousands of, yes, “everyday people” in all 75 Arkansas counties. She came, she saw, she talked, and she listened. As a secondary matter, Hillary’s image problems among Arkansan voters faded away.
How it works is pretty simple: You accept Arkansas, Arkansas accepts you. I’m pretty sure this is broadly true of Iowa and New Hampshire voters too. So is there an element of calculation in Hillary’s latest listening tour? Sure there is.
Is it merely cheap political theater?
Look, she’s a professional politician running for president. Of course her campaign events are stage-managed. How could they not be? Just as she ran for the U.S. Senate from New York back in 1999, a state where she’d never actually lived.
Although New Yorkers tend to be more flattered than offended when famous carpetbaggers descend upon them, she held small forums all across the state — impressing most observers with her industriousness and knowledge of local issues. America’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, backed out of the race.
She’s a very smart cookie, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And she always does her homework. No, she’s not a mesmerizing speaker like Bill, and not the most outwardly charismatic politician in the race (whoever that may be). GOP focus groups say her biggest weakness is their perception of her “entitlement” and seeming remoteness from ordinary people’s lives.
So off she goes on another listening tour. “A sweet, docile granny in a Scooby van,” Dowd sneers. However, contrary to reporters who marvel at Hillary’s “willingness to put on the hair shirt of humility to regain power,” she actually appears to enjoy the fool things.
Partly, it’s a woman thing. See, Hillary and my wife worked together back when the governor’s wife served on the board of Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Diane always mentioned two things: how hard she worked on children’s health issues, and how she never pulled rank.
But what really endeared her to my wife was Hillary’s empathy during a prolonged medical crisis involving our son. At times, Diane was under terrible emotional strain. Hillary never failed to show concern. Was the new treatment helping? Had we thought about seeking another opinion? She acted like a friend when my wife needed all the friends she could get.
And no, there was nothing in it for her. I wasn’t a political journalist then. It wasn’t about me. It was about two mothers.
In an article unfortunately headlined “Manufacturing Authenticity,” Slate’s John Dickerson gets it right. For all her privilege and celebrity, Hillary “has something going for her that other politicians do not when it comes to these kinds of events… she has thought about family issues her entire life.”
Dickerson marveled that in Iowa, “Clinton actually appeared to be listening.”
And that could turn out to be her secret weapon.
By: Gene Lyons, Featured Post, The National Memo, April 22, 2015
“Zombies Of 2016”: As Far As Issues Go, 2016 Is Already Set Up To Be The Election Of The Living Dead
Last week, a zombie went to New Hampshire and staked its claim to the Republican presidential nomination. Well, O.K., it was actually Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. But it’s pretty much the same thing.
You see, Mr. Christie gave a speech in which he tried to position himself as a tough-minded fiscal realist. In fact, however, his supposedly tough-minded policy idea was a classic zombie — an idea that should have died long ago in the face of evidence that undermines its basic premise, but somehow just keeps shambling along.
But let us not be too harsh on Mr. Christie. A deep attachment to long-refuted ideas seems to be required of all prominent Republicans. Whoever finally gets the nomination for 2016 will have multiple zombies as his running mates.
Start with Mr. Christie, who thought he was being smart and brave by proposing that we raise the age of eligibility for both Social Security and Medicare to 69. Doesn’t this make sense now that Americans are living longer?
No, it doesn’t. This whole line of argument should have died in 2007, when the Social Security Administration issued a report showing that almost all the rise in life expectancy has taken place among the affluent. The bottom half of workers, who are precisely the Americans who rely on Social Security most, have seen their life expectancy at age 65 rise only a bit more than a year since the 1970s. Furthermore, while lawyers and politicians may consider working into their late 60s no hardship, things look somewhat different to ordinary workers, many of whom still have to perform manual labor.
And while raising the retirement age would impose a great deal of hardship, it would save remarkably little money. In fact, a 2013 report from the Congressional Budget Office found that raising the Medicare age would save almost no money at all.
But Mr. Christie — like Jeb Bush, who quickly echoed his proposal — evidently knows none of this. The zombie ideas have eaten his brain.
And there are plenty of other zombies out there. Consider, for example, the zombification of the debate over health reform.
Before the Affordable Care Act went fully into effect, conservatives made a series of dire predictions about what would happen when it did. It would actually reduce the number of Americans with health insurance; it would lead to “rate shock,” as premiums soared; it would cost the government far more than projected, and blow up the deficit; it would be a huge job-destroyer.
In reality, the act has produced a dramatic drop in the number of uninsured adults; premiums have grown much more slowly than in the years before reform; the law’s cost is coming in well below projections; and 2014, the first year of full implementation, also had the best job growth since 1999.
So how has this changed the discourse? On the right, not at all. As far as I can tell, every prominent Republican talks about Obamacare as if all the predicted disasters have, in fact, come to pass.
Finally, one of the interesting political developments of this election cycle has been the triumphant return of voodoo economics, the “supply-side” claim that tax cuts for the rich stimulate the economy so much that they pay for themselves.
In the real world, this doctrine has an unblemished record of failure. Despite confident right-wing predictions of doom, neither the Clinton tax increase of 1993 nor the Obama tax increase of 2013 killed the economy (far from it), while the “Bush boom” that followed the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 was unimpressive even before it ended in financial crisis. Kansas, whose governor promised a “real live experiment” that would prove supply-side doctrine right, has failed even to match the growth of neighboring states.
In the world of Republican politics, however, voodoo’s grip has never been stronger. Would-be presidential candidates must audition in front of prominent supply-siders to prove their fealty to failed doctrine. Tax proposals like Marco Rubio’s would create a giant hole in the budget, then claim that this hole would be filled by a miraculous economic upsurge. Supply-side economics, it’s now clear, is the ultimate zombie: no amount of evidence or logic can kill it.
So why has the Republican Party experienced a zombie apocalypse? One reason, surely, is the fact that most Republican politicians represent states or districts that will never, ever vote for a Democrat, so the only thing they fear is a challenge from the far right. Another is the need to tell Big Money what it wants to hear: a candidate saying anything realistic about Obamacare or tax cuts won’t survive the Sheldon Adelson/Koch brothers primary.
Whatever the reasons, the result is clear. Pundits will try to pretend that we’re having a serious policy debate, but, as far as issues go, 2016 is already set up to be the election of the living dead.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 24, 2015
“White Evangelical Voters Are A Fickle Lot”: Giving The “Gays, Guns, And God” Bloc Reason To Stay Home In 2016
For the 2004 presidential election, political strategist Karl Rove resolved to avoid a too-close-to-call repeat of the 2000 contest. He believed as many as 4 million white evangelical voters failed to show up in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Four years later, President Bush was enjoying high approval ratings as a “war president,” but Rove wasn’t taking any chances. He set out to inflame conservative fear with a campaign strategy built on a theme of “Gays, Guns, and God.”
White evangelical voters are a fickle lot. They don’t support just any Republican. They need to be courted. Wined and dined, you might say. John McCain, who never cared for social conservatives or their penchant for governmental control over private behavior, saw 2 million fewer white evangelical votes than President Bush did four years prior. Even more stayed home in 2012.
In launching his 2016 campaign at Liberty University, Ted Cruz was making clear his intention to be the Republican candidate of the “gays, guns, and God” bloc. But, according to Bloomberg Politics‘ Dave Weigel and Ben Brody, the Texas senator is aiming higher than Rove did. Cruz, they said, is banking on the theory “that 8 million to 9 million white evangelical voters haven’t been turning out. As many as 35 million of their peers had, but if the exit polls were right, enough evangelicals stayed home to lose states like Ohio and Florida” in 2008 and 2012.
So Cruz cut to the chase in Lynchburg: “Roughly half of born-again Christians aren’t voting. They’re staying home. Imagine, instead, millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values.”
It’s a gamble, as presidential politics tends to be. But his odds are made longer by two factors. One is obvious. Cruz is hoping to double the “gays, guns, and God” bloc — 4 million more than Rove got. The other reason is more complicated, and it has nothing to do with immigration.
Immigration, liberal commentators pointed out within hours of Cruz’s announcement, was a serious concern among white evangelicals. Indeed, immigration may be a wedge issue facing the entire GOP presidential field. In Cruz’s case, he has sounded a jeremiad against “amnesty” since he took office in 2010, but most evangelicals favor, on moral grounds, a path toward citizenship. In other words, Cruz’s position on immigration is stark, while the position of the constituency he is courting is nuanced.
It’s interesting, this search for a wedge issue among Republicans vis-à-vis immigration, but it’s doomed. White evangelical voters don’t vote for things; they vote against them. And they vote against things by voting for the man who’s against them. Cruz does indeed oppose immigration reform — he pulls at the nativist’s heart strings — but that’s not going to deter the “gays, guns, and God” bloc. What deters such voters is a Republican Party insufficiently committed to annihilating gay marriage.
Here, I think, are the makings of a wedge issue. Gay marriage may be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court for a constitutional resolution, but it has been settled socially and culturally, according to public opinion polls. The difference is that we are now seeing that resolution’s political effects. Recent bids by legislatures in Indiana and Arkansas to permit discrimination in the guise of religious liberty were met with vehement resistance, not from liberal activists so much as the Republican Party’s largest and most powerful wing: business. To be anti-gay is now to be anti-business. If Ted Cruz is smart — and he is — he won’t give the business establishment reason to worry.
From the point of view of someone who genuinely believes that homosexuals, in seeking the blessings of marriage, are defying the will of God, this is infuriating. If the Republicans don’t defend “American values,” who will? GOP candidates are clever enough to find ways of dodging the issue. They’ll say they are personally against it, but defer to the will of the people. They’ll say it’s a matter for the states to decide. These are unsatisfying answers, because they don’t reflect the paranoid authoritarian tendencies of white evangelicals.
To be sure, Republicans like Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal are defying the business establishment. In an op-ed on Thursday’s New York Times, he said: “As the fight for religious liberty moves to Louisiana, I have a clear message for any corporation that contemplates bullying our state: Save your breath.” You might say he’s pandering to white evangelicals, and you’d be right, but that’s not all. Jindal is probably running for vice president. After Indiana and Arkansas, it’s clear the business establishment does not want an anti-gay plank on the GOP’s 2016 platform. But if the nominee can’t openly defend “American values,” at least Jindal can.
Even so, that ticket — in which the presidential nominee appeases the business wing while the vice presidential nominee appeases white evangelicals — is vulnerable to attack. The Democratic Party’s operatives might consider exploiting it. White evangelical voters are fickle for a reason: they are absolutists. A qualified stand against “the encroaching secular theocracy” is the same thing as surrendering to secularization, which is inconceivable to them. In light of debacles in Indiana and Arkansas, the Democrats can now sow the seeds of doubt: The business wing runs the GOP, so the GOP opposes “religious freedom.” With no where else to go, that might be enough for the “gays, guns, and God” bloc to stay home in 2016.
By: John Stoehr, Managing Editor of The Washington Spectator; The National Memo, April 25, 2015
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