The Hillary Fantasy It’s duller than Bernie’s, but no less unrealistic.By James Taranto
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hillary-fantasy-1454697687
Having been blindsided from the left for the second time in as many presidential campaigns, inevitable Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is trying to mount a defense. Here’s the thrust and parry with immoderate moderator Rachel Maddow, from last night’s Clinton-Sanders squirmish on MSNBC:
Maddow: Secretary Clinton, Sen. Sanders is campaigning against you now, at this point in the campaign, basically arguing that you are not progressive enough to be the Democratic nominee. He has said that if you voted for the Iraq war, if you are in favor of the death penalty, if you wobbled on things like the Keystone Pipeline or TPP [the Trans-Pacific Partnership], if you said single-payer health care could never happen, then you’re too far to the right of the Democratic Party to be the party’s standard-bearer.
Given those policy positions, why should liberal Democrats support you and not Sen. Sanders?
Mrs. Clinton: Well because I am a progressive who gets things done.
Before elaborating, she went off on three separate tangents. First, she informed viewers that “the root of that word, progressive, is progress.” (The word duh, by contrast, is sui generis.)
Second, she listed a bunch of Democrats, past and future, who supposedly wouldn’t be pure enough to meet Sanders’s definition of a progressive: President Obama; Vice President Biden; Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the state in whose primary next week Sanders is expected to trounce Mrs. Clinton; and “even the late, great Senator Paul Wellstone.”
So according to Mrs. Clinton, even Paul Wellstone wasn’t as progressive as Sanders. If that’s meant to be an appeal to the left, it seems like one on Sanders’s behalf, not Mrs. Clinton’s.
Third, she went on about gun control, the only issue on which she is undeniably to the left of Sanders, hailing as he does from a constitutional-carry state. “I don’t think it was progressive to vote to give gun makers and sellers immunity,” Mrs. Clinton said. She said something about immigration, then finally circled back to the “progressive who gets things done” theme:
So we could go back and forth like this, but the fact is most people watching tonight want to know what we’ve done and what we will do. That’s why I am laying out a specific agenda that will make more progress, get more jobs with rising incomes, get us to universal health-care coverage, get us to universal pre-K, paid family leave and the other elements of what I think will build a strong economy, that will ensure Americans keep making progress. That’s what I’m offering and that’s what I will do as president.
Later she added this:
I am not going to make promises I can’t keep. I am not going to talk about big ideas like single-payer and then not level with people about how much it will cost. . . .
I’m not going to tell people that I will raise your incomes and not your taxes, and not mean it, because I don’t want to see the kind of struggle that the middle class is going through exemplified by these promises that would raise taxes and make it much more difficult for many, many Americans to get ahead and stay ahead. That is not my agenda.
Inspiring, isn’t it?
The “progressive who gets things done” theme has been fleshed out by many left-liberal commentators. Last month former Enron adviser Paul Krugman plugged Hillary and slugged Bernie in a column titled “How Change Happens”:
[Obama’s] achievements have depended at every stage on accepting half loaves as being better than none: health reform that leaves the system largely private, financial reform that seriously restricts Wall Street’s abuses without fully breaking its power, higher taxes on the rich but no full-scale assault on inequality. . . .
And the question Sanders supporters should ask is, When has their theory of change ever worked? Even F.D.R., who rode the depths of the Great Depression to a huge majority, had to be politically pragmatic, working not just with special interest groups but also with Southern racists. . . .
Sorry, but there’s nothing noble about seeing your values defeated because you preferred happy dreams to hard thinking about means and ends. Don’t let idealism veer into destructive self-indulgence.
Ezra Klein, editor of the young-adult site Vox, followed up a week later with “Hillary Clinton and the Audacity of Political Realism”:
The argument for [Mrs.] Clinton is that she’s best suited to handle this war of partisan attrition—she knows how to work the bureaucracy, defend against a hostile Congress, and find incremental gains where they exist. This is a realistic vision of a Democratic presidency after Obama. It’s a vision, as best I can tell, that’s shared by Obama. But it’s not a vision liberals want to believe in. It’s not a vision that Hillary Clinton has figured out how to sell. Perhaps it’s not a vision that can be sold.
Blogger Allen Clifton weighed in this week with a post so counterintuitive that Slate should have published it, “Like It or Not, Hillary Clinton Is Being More Honest With Voters Than Bernie Sanders”:
I can promise you this much: when it comes to socializing health care, free public college, more than doubling the minimum wage, raising taxes on the middle class and passing trillions in tax hikes for the wealthy—there’s absolutely zero “common ground” to be found within the GOP on any of that.
The claim, then, is not that Mrs. Clinton has any record of “getting things done,” but that she is likelier than Sanders to get things done because she has a more realistic view of what is politically possible.
But how realistic are Mrs. Clinton’s promises? An old joke has it that if the opposite of “pro” is “con,” the opposite of progress is Congress. Mrs. Clinton might dispute the etymology, but Krugman, Klein and Clifton all stipulate the near-certainty of a Republican House majority next year (and Krugman believes the Democrats will be “lucky” even to take the Senate).
If Republicans control just one congressional chamber, Mrs. Clinton’s modest ambitions—to “get us to universal health-care coverage, get us to universal pre-K, paid family leave”—are as fantastical as Sanders’s temerarious ones, a point Klein concedes:
Democrats were bitterly disappointed by the compromises Obama made when he had huge Democratic majorities. The compromises the next Democratic president will have to make, given the likely Republican dominance of Congress, are going to be even more brutal for liberals—and if they’re not, it will likely be because nothing of importance gets done in the first place.
The Republicans, by contrast, have a decent shot at taking the presidency and holding the Senate, which would give them the ability to get things done (constrained only by the Senate filibuster). Electing Mrs. Clinton would spare progressives that nightmare. She could also follow Obama’s lead and test the limits of executive power to make policy more liberal without changing the law.
But all that is as true of Sanders as they are of Mrs. Clinton; and if their campaign rhetoric is a reliable indicator, he would be bolder than she in employing executive action, except in the area of gun control.
The only reason for an ideological progressive to prefer Mrs. Clinton over Sanders as the nominee would be risk-aversion—i.e., the assumption that she would have a better chance of winning in November. The combination of her lackluster personality, reputation for corruption, and possible legal jeopardy make that assumption a questionable one.
In touting her ability to get things done, Mrs. Clinton may be counting on her married name to provide a halo effect. (Think about that for a moment.) While her own Clinton-era effort at getting something done, the health-care reform of 1993-94, ended in abject failure, it is true that Bill Clinton had numerous legislative victories during his two terms, even during the 1½ terms when Republicans controlled Congress.
But much of what Mr. Clinton accomplished was abhorrent from a progressive perspective: welfare reform, tougher criminal laws, a modicum of domestic spending restraint, investment tax cuts, banking deregulation, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mrs. Clinton (in some cases joined by Mr. Clinton) has attempted to distance herself from many of these accomplishments.
So what could Mrs. Clinton actually get done if she were president? In an uncharacteristically insightful piece, Vox’s Matt Yglesias offers some speculation: “A Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership,” “Corporate tax reform,” “Boost in infrastructure spending,” “EITC [earned-income tax credit] for childless men,” “The Grand Bargain” (i.e., a budget deal that reduces entitlement spending and raises taxes), and “Skilled immigration changes.”
Progressives would probably support the infrastructure spending and EITC expansion without reservation, if (a big if) they were not accompanied by any provisions to which they’d object, such as reforms of prevailing-wage rules or anti-welfare-fraud measures.
“These are the kinds of things that deserve to be highlighted more in the primary campaign,” Yglesias writes, “but aren’t partially because [Mrs.] Clinton doesn’t talk about them—in part because they’re kind of boring, but also because they’re not necessarily all things liberals will like.”
If Sanders becomes president, the ensuing four years are likely to resemble the preceding six. If Mrs. Clinton does, there’s a chance they’ll end up looking more like the last six years of Mr. Clinton’s administration. Given those two unappealing options, why wouldn’t progressives vote for the candidate whose sincere commitment to their ideals is beyond dispute?
And That’s Why She Set Up a Private Server
“ ‘This is excessive classification. This is the government having too sensitive a standard for what they think the public should be able to see. We want all our emails released.’ ”—Brian Fallon, Hillary Clinton campaign press secretary, quoted in the Washington Free Beacon, Feb. 5
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