Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination mainly because she voted for the Iraq war. Facing serious competition in her do-over White House bid for the first time, how is she handling a surging Bernie Sanders?
By complaining the Vermont socialist isn’t hawkish enough.
Clinton has incorporated a critique of Sanders’ foreign policy into her stump speech as she has stepped up attacks on her main opponent for the Democratic nomination as he has taken the lead in recent polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
“Sanders doesn’t talk very much about foreign policy, but when he does, it raises concerns because sometimes it can sound like he hasn’t really thought it through,” Clinton said. “The challenges a president has to grapple with are beyond complicated, both at home and abroad. That’s why it’s the hardest job in the world. I’ve seen it up close and personal and I know what it takes.”
So far, so good. Sanders is most interested in economics and his approach to foreign policy often seems perfunctory and slapped together. Whether that is really a big vote-loser with the Democratic primary electorate, particularly its segment that likes openly socialist economics, is questionable. But it’s a promising line of attack of a recent former secretary of state.
The Democratic front-runner has gone beyond that to level specific criticisms of Sanders on Iran. Her opponent is too willing to engage Iran in the fight against the Islamic State, she says, and is too eager to reopen normal diplomatic relations with Tehran.
“For example, he suggested we invite Iranian troops into Syria,” Clinton said at the Iowa rally. “That is like asking the arsonist to be the firefighter. As bad as things are in Syria, and they are, more Iranian troops are only going to make it worse.”
Clinton foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan noted Iran “seeks the destruction of Israel” and is “flouting international law with its ballistic missile threats.” Sullivan added that normalizing relations with Iran was a “bridge too far” even for supporters of President Obama’s nuclear deal.
The candidate herself was more scathing. “We’ve had one good day over 36 years and I think we need more good days before we move more rapidly toward any kind of normalization,” Clinton said at the most recent Democratic debate.
Leave aside who is right for the merits on this issue for the moment and look only at the politics. Barack Obama talked about meeting with governments like Iran’s “without precondition.” He won the Democratic nomination. It’s not entirely clear how much that position even cost him in the general election, where it would clearly be more of a liability than with just Democrats.
There are Democratic voters who liked Obama’s “hope and change” who might think Sanders’ talk of additional diplomatic overtures to Iran finishes the president’s work. And even Sanders concedes we shouldn’t “open an embassy in Tehran tomorrow.”
“His position is the very caricature that Republicans like to put forward of Democrats or Hillary Clinton,” Hillary communications director Brian Fallon told reporters last week. Fallon later added that Sanders’ “grave misunderestimation of Iran” would be a particularly hard position for a Democratic nominee to defend next fall … Republicans would love to have a debate with someone who wants warmer relations with a sponsor of terrorism.”
Indeed, they would. But there’s the rub: Clinton is still banking that peacenik impulses on foreign policy questions remain the same political third rail for Democrats that they were back when she was working for George McGovern, that Obama’s nomination and election changed nothing. That calculation may or may not be true, but it isn’t what most Democratic voters currently believe.
Can you still win a Democratic primary by claiming your opponent is too dovish? Especially when that opponent supported the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya, favored the Afghan surge and really only opposed the Iraq war even most Republican presidential candidates now concede was a mistake?
Clinton’s core problem in both 2008 and 2016 is that she is a product of a different era of Democratic politics, much like Jeb Bush is a throwback on the Republican side. She can play catch-up, as liberal politicians usually do as their base moves leftward. But not for the first time, she has demonstrated she still believes in her husband’s Democratic Leadership Council, third way politics, which implies a certain defensiveness about liberal stands that bedeviled Democrats during the Reagan years.
This problem is less likely to prove fatal this year than it did eight years ago. Even if Sanders does beat Clinton in one or both of the first two nominating contests, he lacks the strong black support Obama enjoyed that would allow him to capitalize. He too is a relic of the past, when the Democrats were less diverse and cared primarily about economic liberalism.
Sanders also lacks the calm and reasonable demeanor that helped Obama sell his foreign policy prescriptions. Obama may have been a lefty college professor, but Sanders comes across as one. Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war got him in the door, but his political talent and minority support got him across the threshold.
If Sanders can’t take advantage of Clinton’s throwback politics, perhaps someone else will. As she and her husband once reminded us, yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.
