holding on to yesterday

Someone, whose opinion I trust, asked me, after seeing Bill Clinton speak in the wake of Obama's rout of Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, "Does Bill Clinton have Alzheimers?" This is a good question. Where is the guy who usually raised the level of intelligence in political discussions? Has the so-called Great Triangulator lost his political instincts? Has he lost his mind? Or is he stuck so entirely in the past that he can't see the present reality? The present reality is that Obama represents the future, whereas the Clinton name represents the past.

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What is the past anyway, the good times of the Clinton 90s? What is the nature of the Clinton "mystique" among Democrats and is there really a mystique? My memory is that Clinton might not have won the Presidency in 1992 if Ross Perot had not siphoned Republican votes from Bush I. For Democrats, however, he was that knight in shining armor, whose election ended the dark times of the Reagan/Bush I era. The immediate and persistent effort of Conservatives to undermine the results of the 1992 election (and the subsequent one in 1996), caused Democrats to rally around Clinton I, even if his actual policies were not fully supported. To be sure, Clinton was rational, lucid, in control of the facts and nuances of the interpretation of facts, which made a stark contrast with Reagan. The economy eventually boomed and Clinton (in comparison to Bush II) did not enter into ill-advised military adventures. And he was well-liked abroad. But on the whole, I think the mystique is not so much the product of actual policy outcomes as the result of negatives: Clinton was not Reagan, he was not one of the self-righteous Republicans who waved the stained dress in public, and, most importantly, he was not Bush II. Unlike the Kennedy mystique, which is also short on substance, the Clinton mystique lacks any inspirational qualities. It is true that the Kennedy mystique might have been a post-assassination production (the Camelot imagery), but the Kennedy name inspires hope, the Clinton name does not.

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Hence, for Bill Clinton it must have been a painful thing indeed, as BBC commentator Katty Kay pointed out on a Sunday morning talk show, that Obama called Reagan the Great Transformer rather than Clinton. This single statement, not uttered in anger or spite by Obama, must have been the bee sting that roused the hibernating bear. Whatever it was, Bill Clinton has engaged in the type of personality destruction that has mostly characterized the demagoguery of Republican political operatives. Obama, in a typically understated way, had called the Clinton mystique into question. Bill Clinton has responded, and the response to the mere "fairytale" has diminished the former President.

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To be sure, there are enough Establishment Democrats left who benefited from the Clinton mystique to keep the upstart Obama off-balance. The party apparatus doesn't really want change, and the Hill/Bill Team is a comfortable old shoe in which to slip the party's hopes. Obama, unlike Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman senator (also from Illinois), did not work his way up the ranks of the Democratic party apparatus. Hence, the message of change that is compatible to the Establishment is a change to the past of Clinton I. Certainly, Bill Clinton has the sort of rock star effect on crowds that Obama has. But the difference is that whereas people want to be near Bill Clinton, they want to follow Obama. Hillary Clinton does not and never has had the effect that her husband and her competitor have on Democratic voters. Thus is remains important for her campaign to unleash Bill Clinton, for as much as he reminds people of Monica-Gate, he also reminds them of the good olds days, the twelve years between Reagan/Bush I and the eight years of Bush II. 

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Should Obama directly challenge the Clinton mystique? Probably not, since the Establishment Democrats would also be threatened. But he can sharpen his criticism of style. And he could simply name this style as a type that will not regain the White House for the Democrats. The Clintonistas are banking on the fact that no matter how "Republican" she runs her primary campaign, Democrats will still rally to her if she wins the nomination. This, rather than Obama's campaign, is the actual roll of the dice. Just remember John Kerry.

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).