Hillary Clinton and “The Base”

Progressives have perfected a lethal poli-sci-sounding complaint about their right-wing opponents: they pander to their base—and, gosh, with a base full of small-minded bigots, it’s little wonder conservative leaders can’t be intelligent about the oh-so-complex challenges facing governments today.

After the Great Depression, conservatives—both the aloof elitists and the faux populists—toiled at marketing-pleasing labels for themselves. Nixon’s “silent majority” and John Diefenbaker’s “un-hyphenated Canadians” were especially successful; conservative politicians stopped being seen as incompetent WASPs.

In this new century, however, conservatives have largely suffered profitably in silence.  

Letting their opponents describe their supporters in almost lurid terms has helped keep that base militant. However, it complicates things for conservatives stuck in opposition or, in Stephen Harper’s case, without anywhere near enough votes to win in October.

Representing a militant base doesn’t win the center. Independents in both countries avoid cell groups and movements; they don’t vote for bigger government or for throwing civil servants living just next door out of work. They leave the unpleasant stuff to elected governments.

The qualifier for conservative and progressive politicians who want to win national elections is to serve a broader purpose than redressing the grievances and florid dreams of their most righteous partisans. 

The center isn’t smarter than the wings, who care the most. Its hot buttons, however, are different. The center wants presidents and prime ministers who are strong enough to represent them without having to hit the streets and make as much noise as the extremes.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t have an experience problem—or advantage. She’s spent all her quality time, all her life, with smart people, she ran for president before, and thrives in Manhattan. She doesn’t need training wheels and is given no slack for gaffes or innocent mistakes. 

Yet she’s already put her savvy and her character in doubt on a test no president has failed since the 1920s: free trade verses protection.

Her decision to oppose last week’s fast-track legislation to allow Barack Obama to complete the negotiation of a free-trade agreement with American allies and market economies next to China kept her “base” content—last week.

But last week’s pander won’t be her last. Her “base” didn’t kill the trade negotiations, negotiations that she helped launch. Instead she’s generated sticky questions about her political judgment, policy smarts and integrity. She has a lot more bowing to do.

Did her endlessly calculating machine figure out what she’ll say when Congress does, in fact, give Obama a second chance and, when he does, in the end, secure the TAPP free-trade agreement?

Will Clinton remain opposed? And if so, has she figured out how to confront China without allies who trust her?

Will she end up pressured to support Obama? If so, what happens to the family conceit of being smarter and tougher than the lame duck family in the White House?

Has she concocted a bold, courageous, original idea to wipe clean the impression today that she can’t stand up to the most reactionary elements of her “base” and Senator Bernie Sanders, an opinionated windbag from Vermont?

Centrists in the US and in Canada don’t see themselves as trade or diplomacy experts but they worry about the global economy and China. And they will likely not vote for leaders who worry more about the sensibilities of their “base.”

Larry Summers and the Democrat’s Brand

Obama's public abandonment of Larry Summers as his choice as next Chair of the US Federal Reserve will not significantly alter Obama’s biography. He was able to lose compromising friends on his rise to power. He’s merely reminded us this week that he can do the same to big shots now that he’s in.

When Great Britain ruled the waves, Lord Palmerston boasted that his England had permanent interests, but no permanent friends. Democratic Party strategists, along with Obama and Summers apologists, have been trying out a variety of arguments to dignify Obama’s treatment of his closest advisor during his closest call with catastrophe: the financial collapse of 2008-09.  

Summers isn’t just unlovable—as Winston Churchill and his team discovered they were in the first election after World War II. Rather, Summers gave bad advice to Clinton and Obama—two great liberal presidents—and, thereby, blemished their party’s brand and the populist economic message they want to offer America in 2016. Conversely, Summers had been too willing to throw around government resources during the 2008-09 crisis to enjoy compensating support now from Republican ideologues in the Senate.

The most lethal force, however, was the explicit intention of the ideological left wing of the Democrat Party to dissociate their party from Wall Street plutocrats and their alleged spear-carrier, Larry Summers.

Noam Scheiber in The New Republic nicely lays out the politics of this campaign.

“All of which is to say that the senators and liberals who spent the last five years quietly seething at Team Obama’s solicitousness toward Wall Street weren’t wrong to channel their resentments at Larry Summers. The world, and certainly the Democratic Party, has changed quite a bit since Bill Clinton was president. Overwhelmingly, Democrats now see their economic interests as opposed to Wall Street’s rather than aligned with it. Summers is a product of an era when the Democratic mindset was largely the reverse.”

It will be interesting to see how the old center of the Democratic Party and their coastal strongholds respond to this.

Will they stand back while the left wing of their party takes on big capitalism and the Republicans? Except when interviewed on CNBC, do they truly believe that the Republicans have surrendered the center and care more about abstractions than they do?

Swearing to punish bankers and, for starters, humbling an eminent public servant might be fun. However, other than as a last resort, are Americans ready to invite the public sector’s regulators, visionaries, and $billions to direct the economy? To keep America number one, with a Scandinavian economy? 

Hillary Clinton’s awful power over influential Democrats

Today, practicing Catholics are coping without an infallible Pope. Must professional Democrats always have an inevitable Clinton to follow?

For the time being, “Yes, buster” is the Sound Observer’s answer when talking about the next president, according to Scott Conroy in Real Clear Politics.

Conceivably, “others” will start getting “active.” It’s a free country. But we must be patient: 2013 will be used up waiting for Hillary Clinton to rest up, create her own profit center in the Clinton Empire of memoir-writing and motivational speaking, nurture and prune her cadre of insiders, and decide whether she wants to be the next president of the United States.

Hillary Clinton is not an incumbent president, Conroy reminds us sternly. She is, however, an “almost president” who could “freeze the field.” Clinton strategist Doug Hathaway suspects that eventually there will be a race. For now, however, no one is prepared to accept that, yes, there will be primaries, challengers, and, for heaven's sakes, divisive issues along the way. Those “others” will become “increasingly visible”; who knows what they’d have to say.

Let’s assume that the Freeze for Hillary Clinton Campaign lasts through the spring; and when it melts away, let’s enjoy ourselves.

The closest Democrats truly have to an “almost president” is Al Gore: he looks as healthy as Hillary Clinton, has published more books than all the Clintons combined, and is as opinionated as they come about what Obama and next president must do. Still, he’s not even qualified to be one of the “others.”

Hillary Clinton’s strength on paper is highly flammable.

According to Quinnipiac’s latest poll, she’d beat all the best-known Republican challengers winning around 50% of the vote. With a personal profile as high as Barack Obama’s—without four years of having to say or do anything unpleasant on a wide range of unpleasant domestic issues—she’d do just as well as Obama. Wow.

Hillary Clinton was a great pick and was an industrious Secretary of State; and she is an intelligent woman. These two characteristics are advantages, unquestionably, but they’re not keys to the presidency or, together, settle who is the best candidate for president.

If luck holds for Obama—and the world—foreign-policy discussion could be even less exciting in 2016 than it was in 2012. It’s widely agreed that electing a women is overdue. However, women don’t get special favors in today’s labor market.

Two big questions about 2016 can’t be honestly answered now: the state of mind of the Democratic Party and Clinton’s vitality in 2016.

Whatever you think of President Ronald Reagan retrospectively or hear about how Hillary wore out her younger staff in her last job, we can’t be sure about the future vitality of anyone who is 65 today. It’s polite, but it’s dishonest to avoid the question. And it doesn’t allow for a firm answer—an “inevitable” candidate.

Most important, the Democrats need a good fight about the future. A range of candidates—appealing to their Party’s silent left, smug center, and silent right—need to express new ideas and need to be called out when they say stale things.

Four most of this frustrating century, Democrats have cut their teeth fighting “nutty” Republicans. However, in 2016, they may very likely face an electable Republican and will definitely have to explain why many of the problems that they always say are so important are as big in 2016 as they were a decade earlier, when the Republican tide started to pull out.

On health costs, pubic service performance, domestic security, surveillance and civil rights, tax reform, middle class jobs, social mobility, schooling for poor families, the resources left to the states and cities and the resources spent in Washington, on higher taxes and less generous services, Democrats will have a record to explain-—and transcend.

They won’t be able to run yet another election rallying voters to protect what they have from those who want to go back to a rapidly receding past. 

Republicanism’s own looming danger: “normalcy”

Republicans didn’t just wait for big-government Democrats to age and grow incompetent. They developed a winning formula to unite two powerful electoral strangers: high-spirited fundamentalists and less high-spirited materialists with good pensions and business interests. Republican campaigners could rally these groups around a driving anxiety: “These are not normal times.”

Modern Republicans get elected by promising to clean up the indulgences of their less-adult opponents; they draw lines in the sand; most recently, they talk of Greek immorality and imminent financial collapse. This formula has been strikingly successful.

It’s in trouble now, however—not because the Party is short of fine performers but because their alarming argument is running out of gas from the real world.

Americans aren’t chronically fearful people. They don’t husband old traumas like adults in more slow-moving places like France, Russia, and Canada. So, being stirred to sacrifice requires fresh supplies of American bad news—credible signs of danger, of a danger, incidentally, that can be dropped at the feet of the federal government.

Bloomberg News reported quietly last week that Americans back spending-cut delay. That, itself, isn’t significant. That opinion can change with the times. Most people will delay unpleasantness if pollsters given a credible option.

What’s important, however, is that the failing case for severe cuts (a burgeoning deficit) is itself inflated:

“At the same time, the size and trajectory of the U.S. deficit is poorly understood by most Americans, with 62 percent saying it’s getting bigger, 28 percent saying it’s staying about the same this year, and just 6 percent saying it’s shrinking. The Congressional Budget Office reported Feb. 6 that the federal budget deficit is getting smaller, falling to $845 billion this year — the first time in five years that the gap between taxes and spending will be less than $1 trillion.”

In other words, the more Americans, and their business leaders, who acknowledge the recovery in government revenues as well as growing activity in the private sector, the less they’ll go along with extreme emergency measures to stave off an approaching national bankruptcy.

The Republicans will soon have to re-learn how to play politics more calmly. Indeed, if they’d let a retiring President win a couple of affordable fights, they’d be halfway there.

The world will surely give them a dandy crisis in the future. However, there is no virtue, on earth or in heaven, for inventing one now.