The Chris Moeller Archives

Clinton vs. McCain

So much for my marathon work schedule. The office closed today due to inclement weather, and I'm left with all the time in the world to blog-- that is, between DVD episodes of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "The Wire," and "The Bob Newhart Show." Lucky for you I'm home-- it allows for some top-of-the-line post-Super Tuesday political analysis...

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Despite a concerted media effort to convince us otherwise, Hillary Clinton has had the Democratic nomination for President sewn up since the very beginning, and Super Tuesday's superior delegate count does nothing to dissuade her all-but-official party coronation. If Barack Obama had wanted a fighting chance at the Democratic nomination, he should have run back in 1972 or 1976 during the short period of time in which the party opened itself up structurally to leaders from outside of the machine hierarchy before clamping the lid down tight again in 1980.

A candidate of Clinton's insider position-- as financially prosperous as she was from the beginning, and as low as she and her husband/running mate were willing to stoop during the campaign-- was never going to be seriously challenged for the nomination, especially not by a superficial, posturing opponent who praised when he should have attacked, and who had a murky Iraqi exit strategy and overlapping talking points on "free trade" and employer-based health care.

No, the big news story yesterday was really John McCain running off with the Republican nomination; and now the GOP winds up with the one matchup in the general election that they actually have a chance of winning following the cancerous Bush presidency.

Clinton's preposterous claims of "35 years experience" will be put to shame against McCain, a man who was ending his five years at the Hanoi Hilton in 1973 while Clinton was still in law school. With a former president riding shotgun, Hillary will be unable to paint herself as the candidate of "change" against a "maverick" Republican who isn't part of any recognized "vast right-wing conspiracy." Her talking point about being ready to lead "on day one" will look mighty foolish up against an actual former military commander and war hero, and she stands to be the only person in the hemisphere, aside from her husband, that can rally angry right wing voters and pundits to the cause of a McCain candidacy.

Democrats have sacrificed the entire issue of the war for the '08 campaign (such as they did in '04) by nominating a candidate who voted in favor of the war on Iraq, the war on Iran, and for all of the funding measures that have followed. Senator Clinton will be completely-- and quite fairly-- standing in for a cowardly and do-nothing Democratic Congress that is even more unpopular than the president, and that has not only continued to lavishly finance Bush's illegal war, but has done so with legislation containing neither timetables nor required benchmarks for political or military progress in the region.

November's election will pit the co-author of one of the only significant pieces of campaign-finance legislation this decade against the biggest corporate fundraiser in the race in either party, a woman who voted to keep most-favored-nation trading status with the totalitarian Chinese government, and who was bogged down a decade ago, with her husband, in a scandal involving campaign contributions from the same. It will match a candidate whose "straight-talk" reputation with the media and the public still carries considerable weight against a woman whose veil of secrecy and private calculation is darker than perhaps even that of the Cheney White House.

It is absolutely beyond my intellect, I confess, to figure out what electoral advantage Democrats think Hillary Clinton brings to the table other than her familiarity. As Maureen Dowd pointed out in her New York Times column today, the entire subtext of her campaign thus far has been "You owe me," or more precisely "Bill owes me and you owe him." And I'll add-- lest anyone forget this little piece of accepted pundit wisdom about the Bill Clinton presidential legacy, here's a staged crying fit for the cameras just when the party faithful may feel themselves being swayed by a fresh upstart.

Even if she were to win, what could Americans reasonably expect from a Hillary Clinton presidency? And this is a question that every espoused progressive and Democratic party loyalist should be pondering during the next nine months.

Answer:

-- A still-sizeable military presence in Iraq and the Gulf region, inflaming the Muslim world, as Hillary has already promised repeatedly during her campaign.

-- More saber-rattling with Iran. (Clinton criticized Obama for saying that he would even meet with Iranian leaders, a policy position that puts her to the right of Condoleeza Rice.)

-- No change whatsoever in our so-called global "free trade" policies that have hemorrhaged American jobs, jeopardized consumer safety, and created a trade deficit of more than 763 billion dollars.

-- No meaningful change in regards to our national health care crisis. Expect the same big-money players to make the national health care decisions in a Clinton presidency as Hillary is the 2008 candidate with the largest bank of campaign donations from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

-- More secrecy-- everything from the renewal of the Patriot Act, which Hillary has supported, to the suppression of Oval Office records under claims of marital confidentiality. (Bill has insisted that the records of all communications with his wife during his presidency be withheld from the public until 2012. According to Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, this includes more than 3 million documents involving Hillary's 1993 health care debacle.)

-- Further inaction on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians inflamed by Israel's policy of severe and continual collective punishment on the Palestinian people. (Even with violence flaring in Gaza this week, is this issue even on the collective radar of the U.S. media and our presidential candidates?)

-- No reductions whatsoever in bloated military spending. Corporate criminals, war profiteers, and Congresspersons on the take control this spending, and like every other major presidential candidate, Hillary will do jack-shit to stop or limit them.

-- No crackdown on corporate crime and the fleecing of investors and taxpayers. Clinton already represents Wall Street in the United States Senate, both literally and figuratively, and she has done nothing thus far to make this a legislative priority, nor has she put forth an iota of effort to end corporate giveaways and bailouts. Bill's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, later went to work for Citigroup and got a $40 million consultant's payout. Expect similar anecdotes about officials in Hillary's cabinet. They're already her top campaign consultants.

-- No meaningful change in environmental policy. Campaign pledges aside, how can a president do anything to limit carbon emissions and stop pollution when corporations are given untethered power in the market? This is unwarranted voter confidence in Clinton along the lines of accepting her campaign promises on health care without looking to see who signed the checks.

-- Expect the Democrats to lose their precarious grip on the Congress. It happened with the first Clinton presidency, and I defy anyone to name a single down-the-ticket Congressional or Senate race that a Hillary nomination promises to strengthen in November. A Democratically-controlled Congress still looks invincible for 2008, thanks to George Bush, but another Gingrich-style revolution awaits if we get two more years of Clinton-style triangulation.

posted by CM @ 2:34 PM