Way to Go, Hillary
I’ve lost all respect for Hillary Clinton. I’ve listened to her praise herself and John McCain as being ready for that “3:00 am call” or “to be Commander-in-Chief and reduce Obama to a guy who gave a speech. I truly think that she would rather see McCain win rather than allow Obama to win the nomination. I guess she thinks that this would be a tactically good move for her — McCain’s old, maybe he’ll only serve one term, and she can then try again in 2012.
But what about the damn Supreme Court? I’d always liked the Clintons, but now I see what’s been said about them was, sadly, true, they really only care about themselves — the country can just go hang as long as they get what they want. I don’t mind a tough campaign, but this is trashing the party and the things we stand for. She’s rapidly becoming Lieberman, and believe me, I don’t mean that as a compliment.
Oh, and in case you missed it — that whole NAFTA flap — it was the Clinton campaign who actually went to the Canadian government and said this was just all posturing. Obama’s guy took the meeting, but repeated his candidate’s position — there needed to be some re-negotiation. Obama’s campaign flubbed the response badly, but out and out lies make me crazy. I, the super-voter, am beginning to understand why people don’t vote.
March 7th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
The last week hasn’t made me any fonder of the Clintons, but I think Obama needed a good kick in the pants. He’d been playing the anointed one for too long. What Hillary says is going to be nothing compared to the GOP (I’m sure they’ll Swiftboat him so McCain can stay above the fray), and Obama has to learn to respond better. I just hope he can keep doing it cleaner and not have to stoop to their level. If that happens, then it’s the same old thing all over again.
March 7th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
I agree, the Obama campaign fumbled and bumbled with the NAFTA flap, etc. etc. They had been so sharp up until now. But I find Hillary praising the Republican over a fellow Dem to be just stupid and incredibly short sighted.
In some ways I wish the press would develop a bit of memory. Obama was supposed to lose Texas and Ohio by 20 plus points. Texas was very close and in fact he’s going to end up with more delegates out of Texas than Hillary. But it’s all the now. I’m missing a time when journalists just reported the news. All the talking heads with their speculations are giving me a really big headache.
March 8th, 2008 at 7:31 am
You mean the talking heads aren’t at least as important as the people they talk about? What an interesting idea.
March 8th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Okay, this is just hysterical. Walter posted it to our chat group, and I’m passing it along to all you good folks.
From Snarkyboys.com
The Dune Theory of Democratic Politics, Revised
We were wrong; Barack Obama is the the Democratic Party’s Kwisatz Haderach. He is the shortening of the way, the one who shall give meaning to our lives and make our planet anew.
Like Paul Muad’Dib, his youth was shaped by the untimely loss of his father, who was not of this land. He has been rigorously trained, and recently endured a painful test at the hands of a Bene Gesserit Witch. He achieved a surprise victory in his first combat and it is said that his greatest power is his voice. By some reckonings, he has come before his time.
His enemies consider him a lightweight and dismiss his followers as religious fanatics, prone to chanting his name over and over. Though he has inherited powerful advisers, his wife is counted as a liability.
His true enemy is accused of launching a preemptive war to secure a precious resource in a desert land. Though this enemy has now left the stage, he has been succeeded by a battle-tested champion. Soon, they shall meet in single combat, and the victor shall take the reins of power.
March 8th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Wonderful!
March 8th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Conceivably you might see a fair number of people deciding not to vote if Clinton gets the nomination.
At this point, her appearing at the convention with a majority of elected delegates looks very improbable. So her nomination would involve one or both of setting aside the national party’s rules to seat the Florida and Michigan delegates, or getting the nonelected “superdelegates” to choose her over Obama. Either of those is going to look to a lot of Obama supporters like putting the will of party insiders ahead of the wishes of the voters—and I’m already starting to see anger over this from Obama supporters. Aside from the impact on the November election, I think the Democratic Party would pay a price, in the long run, from convincing a lot of young first-time supporters that their votes and their concerns didn’t mean anything to the party.
A different fannish comparison has been occurring to me: The likeliest scenario for a Clinton victory would work rather like Albus Dumbledore stepping in at end to term to hand Harry Potter a big slug of extra points for House Gryffindor and tip the balance. Except that to a lot of people this would look a lot more like his handing the points to Draco Malfoy and giving the win to House Slytherin. . . .
March 8th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
That’s great, William. Yeah, I’d definitely feel like Slytherin got the nod. Which has a whole garden of Eden/serpent thing that makes me uncomfortable. The problem is that I just don’t like or trust Hillary. I know she’s smart, I know she’s tough, but she’s proving to me the country comes second behind her ego.
March 9th, 2008 at 10:09 am
I’d almost agree with both of you about Hillary (one of the few times I’ve ever voted Republican in a national election was when I registered a protest vote against her when she first ran for the Senate. I knew I wasn’t going to help send the clown she was running against to Congress, and I certainly would not have voted for Rudy had he been her opponent, so it really was a protest vote. I really resented her pretense at being a New Yorker;) only I think a lot of Obama’s success has come in caucuses, not actual primaries, and I think, if Hillary does get the nomination, it will ultimately represent the will of the Democrat majority. Has anyone looked at the delegate tally without caucuses? I’m guessing it gives her a slim lead. Personally I think caucuses are a lousy way to pick a candidate - too many people are left out of the process.
I don’t think they’ll let the MI and FL votes stand - they really can’t and make any claim to fairness.
Though I prefer Obama, I think a ticket with her on top and him as the VP would probably be stronger than anything else the Dems might come up with.
I say all this as someone who really dislikes the Billary ego, too. But I don’t have to like a politician to vote for them.
March 9th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
I still plan to vote for Clinton, though I don’t feel as comfortable about it as I once did. I hate it when candidates play the fear card, which means it could be a long few months if it’s a Clinton-McCain race.
And I also really dislike the whole Superdelegate thing. It just sounds like a continuation of the old-style smoked-filled room, but with more women and less smoke.
Interestingly, much as I like both Democratic candidates, Hillary seems to be picking up a little more of Bill’s “have a good time” attitude. She was pretty funny on SNL last week and seemed to be enjoying herself. Barack Obama, while he’s a smart guy and a very good speaker, seems much stiffer than she does.
The one thing I don’t like about Barack is that some of his people seem to be playing “cult of personality” games.
March 9th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
I’d almost agree with both of you about Hillary. . . .
You have to realize that Melinda and I are coming from distinctly different places. She’s a Democrat, and I think a liberal. I’m a Libertarian, and while I’m definitely not a conservative, I’m not what present-day Americans mean be “liberal,” either. I imagine it probably seems odd to find me taking an interest in the fortunes of the Democratic Party, given that—and it does to me, too. But ultimately, libertarianism grows out of the Enlightenment, and in the United States it takes the Constitution, a quintessential Enlightenment document, as a key reference point; and I see the Republicans not just as having rejected all the values they used to share with Libertarians, but as having turned against the Enlightenment, whereas Democrats still tend to support it. (For that matter, even out and out socialism is an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, and closer in spirit to libertarianism than either is to conservatism.)
If Obama gets the nomination, I will vote for him, not with wild enthusiasm, but as an acceptable compromise. If Clinton gets it, I won’t vote for her. I may abstain, or vote for the Libertarian, or—since not voting for Clinton amounts to favoring McCain—I might hold my nose and vote for McCain, nasty though he is.
The deal-breaker for me is health care mandates. I was seriously terrified when Schwarzenegger was trying to impose them on California; I’m 58 years old, self-employed, and uninsured, because paying for a bare minimum catastrophic policy four years ago cost more than I could afford, and my rates were climbing steadily—and I understand it was California Democrats who blocked the proposal, because they were worried about people who couldn’t afford insurance. I’ve heard from a friend who’s an enthusiastic Obama supporter about the hardship her brother faces in Massachusetts. And yes, I know that Clinton says she’ll make health care affordable. But I’ve seen government plans fail to deliver what they promise; I’m fairly sure that Clinton is envisioning the uninsured as being twentysomethings whose rates are a fraction of mine, and not planning for late middle-aged uninsured people; and frankly, I regard the Democrats as much more concerned about the needs of traditional employees, especially unionized employees, than about self-employed people. And if Clinton comes up with something ruinously expensive—I’ll still have to pay for it. Whereas Obama would let me stay uninsured, and at least not be worse off than I am now, and that makes his proposals bearable.
I’d add, by the way, that I sympathize a lot more with those uninsured twentysomethings than the health policy theorists seem to. The point of mandates is to have a bigger pool and lower insurance costs. But people my age consume a lot more health services than younger people, and will benefit a lot more from that scheme. And people my age also mostly, unlike me, have more assets than younger people and can more easily afford health care. So mandates look to me like a regressive redistribution of wealth—in effect, a tax paid to the insurance companies to subsidize the rich middle-aged at the expense of the poor young. I don’t find the ethics of this convincing even on Democratic grounds.
Other than that, strategically, I see Clinton as appealing to the core Democratic voters—and that means maintaining the current split in American politics where the Democrats have their hard-core partisans and not quite enough independent support to keep the Republicans out of office. And I think that’s a bad thing. Sure, Bush’s performance has been ghastly enough to drag his party down, but you can’t count on McCain to have equally low approval ratings. On the other hand, Obama has been getting support from young people who didn’t used to vote, from a lot of independents and even some Republicans unhappy with the way their party is going, and from better educated and richer Democrats—which I think may be a proxy for the “creative class” Richard K. Florida wrote about a few years ago. Giving the party a new base might keep it alive, or even reshape American politics, the way Reagan did in 1980 (and Obama clearly has that example in mind) or Roosevelt in 1932. It strikes me as worth a try.
March 10th, 2008 at 7:59 am
I completely sympathize, William, but I still want a single payer system a la the Canadian model. I watched SICKO the other night. Moore undercut his, overall, very powerful movie with this long section in Cuba. That was unfortunate because he was raising important and terrifying points about our broken health care system.
Since I am an automatic deny I’m wondering how these mandates are supposed to work. Everybody has to buy health insurance, except there is this whole class of people the insurance companies won’t cover, and they charge us at a prohibitively high rate. Will they be able to do that if mandates are passed? As in the case of your friend’s brother, will I be penalized if I can’t meet the staggering premiums?
If I manage to sell one of my scripts I will get back my Guild coverage in the next quarter and I’d sleep better at night.
And very cool points about the Enlightenment — the Republicans do seem to be the party of willful ignorance. When three of the candidates running for President said they didn’t believe in evolution I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
March 10th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
The whole issue of health care policy is a big and complex one, and I’m not really trying to debate optimal solutions. At this point, neither single payer, which you favor, nor a more completely market-based approach, which I favor, looks likely to be on the table. I’m prepared to vote for Obama even though his health plan isn’t what I would really prefer, because I think the idea of constitutional government has been badly damaged under Bush and I hope that Obama will take steps to restore it.
The issue for me is that Clinton’s proposals look personally threatening to me, and that they could hurt a substantial number of the people she claims to want to help. When she says that Obama would leave fifteen million people uninsured, I can’t help but take that to mean that she expected that there will be fifteen million people who decide that health insurance costs more than they can afford to pay even with major subsidies—and that her remedy for this is to make them pay for it anyway. It strikes me as a Procrustean approach, and I’m not willing to take a chance on it.
March 11th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I’m not taking anyone’s healthcare proposals too seriously at this point. Campaign promises rarely slide through Congress unscathed. My guess is that anything that comes out of the next Congress will be pretty much the same regardless of the Democrat in office (if there’s a Democrat in office).
William, you make some very compelling points about what has happened to both the mainstream parties - I couldn’t agree with you more. The fact that we’ll just get more of the same if Hillary is nominated is a very frightening thought. Obama may turn out to be the biggest disappointment since Jimmy Carter, but, as you say, what he represents is worth a try.