the days of whine and roses

Barack Obama announced today that he'll take on Bill Clinton.

"I have to say just broadly, you know, the former president -- who I think all of us have a lot of regard for -- has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling," he told Good Morning America.

You know, he continues to make statements that aren't supported by the facts, whether it's about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq, or our approach to organising in Las Vegas. You know, this has become a habit.

President Clinton went in front of a large group, said that I had claimed that only Republicans had any good ideas since 1980 ... He was making it up and completely mischaracterizing my statement.

One of the things that I think we're going to have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he's not making statements that are factually accurate," Obama continued.

Message to Mr. Obama: you're in a political campaign, your words will be "mischaracterized". What Bill Clinton has done is nothing compared to what the Republicans would do in the fall campaign. I find it almost laughable that you've chosen to tell the world that you'll now start taking on the former president. That is exactly what you should be doing. Telling us you're going to do it before you do it is just silly. You should already have been doing it. 

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It is this sort of thing that makes me wonder whether Obama actually has the will for the job of President, especially a Democratic President confronting a Republican Senatorial filibuster machine. The Clintonistas won't play nice. Bill Clinton has been through much tougher challenges than the one Obama might present. Hillary has been a punching bag for Republicans since 1992.  In the face of this, does Obama think the talk of changing the tone of American politics will matter? Democratic party hacks like Charlie Rangel will hack away at Obama. Is this a surprise? 

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As I have opined before, the Clintonistas are fully at home in the trenches and there is a risk for Obama if he enters the battle on their terms (namely, he becomes just another politician rather than being the Chosen One). However, I do wonder about Obama's political style. It is often reported that Obama was a community organizer. His background is in Alinsky style organizing, which basically involves going into a community, listening to the complaints of community members, defining a common enemy in populist terms (i.e., the city versus the people; the landlord versus the tenants), picking a winnable battle (i.e., one that is likely to succeed and therefore build confidence in the community), making 'hits' on offices of public officials or engaging in "rent strikes", etc. It is also especially important for the Alinsky style to avoid "divisions", especially racial and ethnic divisions that might exist within the community that is targeted for organizing. I can see aspects of this organizing style in Obama's political style, most notably the populist appeal to "the people" rather than specific groups and the emphasis on "we" rather than "I" in his rhetoric. What is missing, of course, is the direct, confrontational style of Alinskyist community organizing. Ironically, Hillary Clinton's suppressed B.A. thesis is supposed to be on Alinsky; she, on the other hand, does engage in confrontation, seems to relish it, has a knack for it, and a will to succeed in it. 

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Hillary Clinton is running on her "experience" in the White House; hence, much of her campaign is bound up with the good times of the Clinton 90s. Why wouldn't Obama have made this a central point of attack? Bill Clinton was a creature of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the group of centrist Democrats who mapped out a strategy that would bypass the traditional, progressive, activist roots of the Democratic party, the inheritance of the 1960s. Clinton ran in 1992 with a theme of "ending welfare as we know it." And he did. His tactical strategy, nurtured in the DLC, was to steal Republican issues and make them over into moderate Democratic positions. Reagan ran for the Presidency by attacking the Red Soviets and the Welfare Queens. Clinton also ran against these queens, but did so in a truly kinder and gentler way. So when Bill Clinton criticizes Obama for trumpeting Reagan, Obama could point out that Clinton accomplished what Reagan could not; Bill Clinton put Reagan's idea into action ("It takes a President" in the eloquent formulation of Hillary Clinton). Moreover, Clinton launched the research into the policy that became the No Child Left Behind legislation of the first Bush term, which prescribes a method of educational testing that produces statistically unreliable results. Perhaps Obama is unaware of this, but, again, an Alinsky political style would make this a point of confrontation.

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Why mention Reagan? Obama surely knew he was stepping into deep sh*t when he flatly stated that Reagan "changed the trajectory of America" in a way "Bill Clinton did not." There's no need to recite the litany of Reagan's sins here. But it is, in fact, true that Reagan transformed the field of American politics in a way that no Democratic President has since FDR. Reagan co-opted FDR's themes and gave them a supply-side, neo-conservative spin (e.g., FDR's "Four Freedoms for the Fourth" speech*). Bill Clinton's domestic policies grew out of the soil of the Reaganite vision (leaving aside the national health care debacle). Obama could elaborate on this situation and tie Hillary Clinton to her closet Reaganite President-Husband. He could point to the language of Clinton's welfare reform law and show that it is directly hostile to poor, single mothers; that it is morally paternalistic; that it binds these women to men in an unfeminist way. Or Obama could point out that Bill Clinton set a Federal level firewall against "gay marriage" by signing the "Defense of Marriage Act," which stipulates that "the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife." Surely, Obama could point out these features of the Clinton Presidency, in which Hillary Clinton claims an important role. But then, he, like Hillary, would have to find his voice.

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* See the excellent analysis of Reagan and FDR in the dissertation of Jayson Harsin, "A Tale of Two Citizenships: The Economic Rights Discourse of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan" (2005).