These are fascinating times for observers of Democratic politics—immensely so if you’re a PUMA Democrat. PUMA (i.e. Party Unity My Ass) Dems were, of course, the spontaneous, rankled, mostly unorganized sect of the Democratic base pathetically loyal to Hillary Rodham Clinton in the depressing closing days of the ’08 primary. And I was one of them. It was an unusual fit—obviously—with me being a young black male voter in what seemed like an agitated movement of middle-aged white women voters.
For most of 2007 (and her entire political life, really) Hillary had been immersed in Elizabeth I phase—with all of her splendid royal pomp and none of her substance; typified by a frosty carapace of presumptuous entitlement. It had long been impolite, heretic even, for liberals to acknowledge what can generally be called the soullessness of the Clintons. (The reason this was true has to do something with the repulsive, Tartufian character of the Newt Gingrich opposition.)
It was in the heady countdown to the Iowa caucuses that I gave Hillary a second look. Hillary, Inc. was in decline and an unlikely hero of liberal conventional wisdom called Barack Obama was on the ascent. The phenomenon of Obama was disturbing to me because it seemed so… not political. To be sure, politics is mostly illusory bullshit but even by the usual plastic standards, the movement around Obama was an unbelievable rat’s nest of mass irrationalism, racial condescension, and lame hype. Discontent with sociopath John Edwards (whose entire populist pose was nothing more than the co-opted MoveOn wing of the Democratic establishment) I began backing Hillary who marvelously transformed into a heroic, rogue Norma Rae character.
And now she (they) could be coming back.
A couple days ago Bill O’Reilly—bombastic assclown—invited Dick Morris on to discuss a commentary of Hillary’s that piqued his attention. (Interestingly, it was Rewriting History, Dick Morris’s case against Hillary from the political right that had once convinced me I was against her.) In a 60 Minutes interview—that’s still going?—Hillary lamented the sluggish state of the American economy as it has made her attempts, I guess, at smart power more challenging. What seemed to me like an attempt to answer a question and make it through Scott Pelley’s boring inquisition was interpreted by O’Reilly as a “jab” at her boss, the president.
Morris got on to explain that there assuredly as been “a subtle distancing” than began with Hillary’s leave of absence from the heath care reform brawl, and that we should take the possibility of a Clinton-led mutiny seriously.
Let me be clear (as an erstwhile PUMA): Hillary Rodham Clinton should not be president in 2012.
If Obama loses both houses of Congress, sees a precipitous evaporation of his political capital, and comes to be regarded as a miserably failed president, that would be an opportunity to radically shake up Democratic politics for years to come. The temptation of Hillary to make a stab at the nomination should be regarded as an obvious attempt to ensure radical change, post-Obama, doesn’t occur. A Hillary effort, supposedly on the model of Ted Kennedy’s fateful attempt in ’80, is not about policy at all but personality.
Anyone with the balls to challenge the president for his nomination should have one question put to them first: What would you have done differently? Nothing else matters. It’s not enough to dump Obama, recognizing that his great unpopularity would elect a Republican. (That’s nothing more than a cynical political calculation.) There has to have been substantive breaks with the president on policy, and for the right reasons.
It is clear to me on many of the most pressing issues President Clinton would have acted the same as President Obama. Just two examples: (1) The most odious element of ObamaCare is the unconstitutional individual mandate that Hillary steadfastly insisted on while Obama supposedly was against it during the primary; (2) Clinton and Obama both voted for TARP, and I can easily imagine Clinton as the titular head of the Democratic Party corralling Democratic votes in Congress in support of the bailout as Obama did. It’s possible, but certainly not self-evident, that Hillary would have been a more competent manager. It does seem unlikely that self-conscious Hillary would have so publicly agonized over the Afghanistan deliberation, or unwisely pledged the shuttering of Guantanamo within a year.
It’s evident now that the main difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton was simply that of two ambitious people who wanted to be president of the United States at the same time. The rest is just distractive political theater. We mustn’t allow the Clintons to get away with this. They are oligarchical elitists like all the rest. Even the praise that an otherwise hostile media occasionally bestows on them—that they’re smart and wonkish—is revealing. By this, they mean the Clintons are privileged, technocratic statists. (Why just yesterday Bill Clinton, whose deregulatory Treasury operation in the late ‘90s bares great responsibility for the current depression, was on CNBC extolling the virtues of a monstrous, regressive value-added tax.)
This is a party that is terrible need of a drastic reorientation. Foreign policy is far more complicated, but at the very least the party needs to break with the economic policies of the corporatist ruling elite. (This includes the Malthusian regime of “environmentalists” like Al Gore, and the fanatical outrage of anthropogenic climate change from which it grows.)
Like Hope and Change, the pantsuits lady from Foggy Bottom will merely be a stalking horse—that is to say, a vehicle through which the establishment prevents a truly cathartic political revolution.
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