Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign raises an awkward question: How low is the self-esteem of America’s Democrats?
Clinton embodies all the things Democrats supposedly reject. But she’s got money and powerful allies in politics, the media and K Street — and for these reasons, Democratic voters appear ready to settle for her.
Remember back in the heady days of 2006, when the progressive “Netroots” provided a crucial boost for the Democrats to take control of the House and the Senate, and also set the stage for wins in 2008? Lofty ideals motivated the base and the party back then: good government, progressive goals, elevating grassroots over the establishment and the business lobby. If they choose Hillary Clinton in 2016, Democratic voters are openly discarding those ideals.
Iraq was at the heart of liberal passion that drove 2006 and then Barack Obama’s 2008 victories. The war, the Left held, was unjust, too costly and grounded in dishonest premises.
Sen. Clinton, of course, voted for the Iraq war and spoke on the Senate floor in defense of it. But it’s not just Iraq. Her entire record is pro-war. Her husband launched wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. When he was getting impeached in 1998, he launched missile attacks on Iraq.
As Obama’s Secretary of State, Clinton was one of the three Obama aides most responsible for the illegal pre-emptive war in Libya. “We came, we saw, he died,” she gloated after the U.S. helped depose dictator Moammar Qadhafi. This regime change, like the one she supported in Iraq, left a power vacuum that has been filled by chaos and murder. Libya has become a terrorist hotbed and an Islamic State foothold.
Hillary Clinton is a war candidate. Is the Left now cool with that sort of thing?
Ethics, good government, the fight against big money, and the devolution of power away from the lobbyists and political power-brokers — these were the other major themes in 2006 and 2008. Democrats ran promising lobbying reforms. One of Obama’s most compelling themes was his war on lobbyists, and his promise to “end the game-playing” in Washington.
Maybe Obama’s failures in this regard have made the Left give up hope for any change in this regard. That’s the best way to explain how the same electorate could be happy with Hillary Clinton.
Clinton isn’t simply cozy with K Street. She is a hub of the Democrat-K Street axis. Her closest advisors are mostly revolving-door operatives who used their connections from her husband’s administration to get rich as lobbyists or consultants, and then peddle their influence in the Obama administration.
John Podesta, arguably her closest advisor, was a pioneer in the industry of revolving-door lobbyists in the late 1980s, founding a firm with his brother Tony, also a former Democratic aide. In the 1990s, Podesta joined the Clinton administration, and then cashed out again to rejoin his lobbying firm. The firm’s lobbying clients included Citigroup, Aetna, Blue Cross, Dow Chemical, Eli Lilly, AOL-Time Warner, General Electric and other corporate titans.
Clinton-world is full of names that hardly scream good government: Terry McAuliffe, Rahm Emanuel, Mark Penn, Sandy Berger and Lanny Davis. These are the people Democrats are inviting back into the inner circles of power if they send another Clinton to the White House.
Finally, there’s her total resistance to transparency — a necessary pillar of good government. Clinton is famously and stubbornly closed to media. She refused to use the State Department’s email system, instead creating her own email system, which was scrubbed totally clean once congressional digging got too close.
At worst, the email saga shows that Hillary is covering up something. At best, it shows she suffers from a paranoid obsession with secrecy.
Are America’s Democrats really ready to put up with four years of war, corporatism and power-hungry secrecy?
If Democrats do just bow down and embrace Clinton as their candidate, it’s especially sad because she’s not a particularly skilled politician. She’s eminently unlikable. She has run three political races in her life. In 2000, she won, underperforming Al Gore in New York state by 400,000 votes. In 2006, the best congressional year Democrats have had in decades, she won by beating the former mayor of Yonkers. Then in 2008, after shattering fundraising records, she lost the Democratic nomination for president to a first-term senator.
It’s not just that Hillary falls short of the Left’s ideals — it is that these shortcomings are precisely what make her the presumptive frontrunner now. She is on a glide-path to the nomination because of her prowess in corporate fundraising, her decades-long proximity to power and the support she enjoys from the lobbyist-political complex.
Maybe the Democratic base will find a way to fight for what they believe. Or maybe they’ll roll over for Hillary Clinton.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.
