My Problem with Hillary (Updated)

Greenwald expresses well the underlying reasons for my negative feelings about Hillary's candidacy :

...in my view, Howard Dean's 2004 candidacy prompted such passion and excitement not because of any specific policy plans or even views on issues which he advocated (even including Iraq). Far more important was the fact that he looked, sounded and smelled like (and I think actually was) an insurgent candidate -- someone who emerged outside of our corroded Beltway system and seemed legitimately opposed to it, even hostile towards and disgusted by it.

He sounded like an American citizen who was running in opposition to the prevailing Beltway political culture and its rancid operating procedures, not as someone who was a by-product of it eager to prevail within it by adhering to its rules. That was the real "substance" of Dean's campaign, what distinguished it and made it interesting.

It's for that reason that the only presidential candidate, at least among the (credible) Democrats, who seems truly odious is Hillary Clinton, and that is true not so much because of her, but because of the people with whom she has chosen to surround herself and who will run our government should she be elected. To understand why that is so, just read Matt Stoller's superb and important story about how the Clintonistas operate.

The people who are attached to the Clinton campaign and who will be swept back into power with her -- the Terry McAulliffes and Mike McCurrys and Howard Wolfsons and Chris Lehanes and James Carvilles -- are pure embodiments of the whole corrupt and principle-less and worthless edifice. They're the people who, both when they were in power and throughout the Bush presidency, sleazily fed at the trough and they believe in nothing. Cheap and deceitful cynicism is the nourishment which sustains them and, most of all, they love the Beltway power system and can't wait to resume their place in it -- fully preserved and unchanged.

If Hillary's the nominee, I'll vote for her. As cynical as the mindset is that lies behind her campaign, I would argue that it is not as dangerous as the rightist mentality that has taken over the GOP in the last twenty five years.

But I think those of us who are trying to redefine a vital, integrated, radical center have to ask ourselves what is really going on in the mindset of most sane Americans when they judge a particular candidate as presidential or unpresidential.  And we have to own up how we are manipulated by precisely this cynical, power infatuated Beltway agenda which rejects anybody who will not sell out and play the game by its rules. We all seem to accept the Beltway definition of reality as if it's the only possibility.  We do it because people who have power and resources to shape public opinion use it effectively to construct a narrative that defines "normal" reality, and other more reality-based narratives are not supported by enough power and money to present a plausible alternative.

The Beltway folks rejected Gore and embraced Bush, and I will admit to being influenced by the incessant negative portrayals of Gore and only later came to wonder why the Beltway courtiers were giving a man by far his inferior a free pass. I couldn't vote for Bush because of his party's history. He struck me as a decent guy who was out of his depth, but at the beginning I was  open to Bush's proving himself a "compassionate conservative" and a "uniter."

In other words I was sucked in by power's construction of reality to the degree that I was even willing to give Bush a chance.  I'll never do that again, because I'm much clearer now than I was then that individuals don't matter as much as the power base that supports them. This power base should never be given a fair hearing by any sane American, because its agenda is clear, and whatever justifications it might give for its agenda, they have nothing to do with their real motivations, which is to accrue more wealth and power at everyone else's expense. Their only goal in appearing reasonable is to neutralize opposition.

But back in 2000, while I wasn't happy about Bush's election, I wasn't as upset about it as I was when he won in '04.  In 2000 I expected at worst  politics as usual, but in the runup to the war it became clear that we were getting something far worse. And that's when my outrage began. It astonished me how easy it was for the Beltway types to manipulate public opinion. It astonished me how dissent about the war was made to look insane, and how no credible opposition was able to form against it.

Wasn't that Howard Dean's biggest public perception problem? His criticism of the war was deemed radical and leftist. In retrospect it looks like common sense.  What is it about our political culture that a centrist, common-sense perspective like Dean's is made out to be outer-fringe insane.  If outrage is what defines you as insane, and being sane was accepting the Republican agenda and its m.o. for implementing it, then up is down and black is white. Insanity, in fact,  is conscious or unconscious complicity in the GOP program. And insanity means taking what you hear from the Beltway courtiers as defining normal reality.

In 2004, the Beltway courtiers rejected Howard Dean, and public opinion followed.  He wasn't presidential enough.  A soulless stiff like Kerry and callow ignoramus like Bush, however, were deemed presidential.  It's almost as if the Beltway automatically rejects anybody who shows he has a soul, and that automatically meant disqualification for Gore and Dean, and it probably means trouble for Obama.  We'll see--his charm may exempt him.  But it also explains its ready acceptance of Hillary's machine. The people who run it play a game the Beltway courtiers understand. I've been reading Somerby's defense of Hillary, but I don't buy it. She's too complicit in this corrupting power system, and I feel almost as negatively about the faction she represents within the Democratic Party as I do the Republicans as a whole.

I have argued here that the Republican Party has delegitimated itself, and every candidate that it puts forward for national office should be rejected no matter how good the individual candidate might be. Again, it's not about the individual;  it's about the power system behind the individual. And we've learned enough about that power system to know that it must be thoroughly repudiated. But the same holds true for the Democrats.  It's not about liking or disliking Hillary.  It's not a popularity contest.  It's a question of the power network and political mentality that stands behind and supports her.  We need something far better than what she brings with her. And I'll support anybody who seems to have a chance to bring it.

***

Sunday Update: I don't want to appear to be an amanuensis for Glen Greenwald, but his post today connects to this idea about what the GOP thinks as "normal"-- that it's ok for presidents to arbitrarily arrest and lock up American citizens without review or trial.  It's astonishing how non-chalant Giuliani and Romney are about it:

And the power that Guiliani is dreaming of exercising (but don't worry - only "infrequently"), and the power which Romney thinks must be subject to a grand debate among lawyers before he decides whether he has it, was found by the Supreme Court just three years ago in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld -- after George Bush exercised that power against American citizens, with hardly a peep of protest -- to be in violation of the most basic Constitutional guarantees. Explained the Hamdi majority, stating the bleeding obvious:

It would turn our system of checks and balances on its head to suggest that a citizen could not make his way to court with a challenge to the factual basis for his detention by his government, simply because the Executive opposes making available such a challenge. Absent suspension of the writ by Congress, a citizen detained as an enemy combatant is entitled to this process.

And the Court's left-wing terrorist-lover, Antonin Scalia, was joined by John Paul Stevens in dissenting on the ground that the opinion did not go far enough in proclaiming just how repugnant such a power is to our basic Constitutional framework, and Scalia explained: "The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive."

Yet Rudy Guiliani expressly does not believe in this "very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system." And Mitt Romney has to convene a team of lawyers before he can decide whether he does. And Romesh Ponnuru can pass along these views as though they are the most unremarkable things in the world, nothing that warrants comment, just the latest position of the Republican candidates, like whether they believe in adjustments to the capital gains tax or employer mandates (though Ponnuru did note, without specifying the reasons, that Cato's "Crane says he was disappointed with Romney's answer to his question the other night"). If you don't mind going throught the day pass hassle at Salon, read the whole post.

I am still in a state of shock that habeas corpus was so blithely done away with in the passage of the Military Commissions Act.  You have to wonder if these guys in Washington have any concept of the consequences of what they are enacting into law.

Comments

[Matt Zemek]

Jack,

The basketball is lousy so far, so I'm on your blog at halftime of Georgetown-Ohio State....

The big question--one could say, "The ONLY question"--for me is this:

In a landscape where people are so readily manipulated by the media, why is there simultaneously such open distrust of the media, often voiced with a tone that goes beyond mere displeasure and reaches the depths of raw outrage?

There's a huge distaste for groupthink or group agendas on one hand, but then a manifest tendency to shout down perceived mavericks/contrarians on the other.

What is the dynamic?

It has to be more than mere ideological polarization. It also has to be more than the fragmentation of news given the multiplicity of media outlets.

Surely, one would think, ideological opponents should both agree that the media sucks AND, from that realization, acknowledge that the Republic is in trouble as a result.

Why no commonality or shared purpose in that regard?

[Jack Whelan]

Matt--

I think it boils down to people not really being that interested in national politics, at least compared to other things going on in their life. So they accept the MSM version of reality by default. It's all too abstract for most people. Hardly anyone outside of the military families is affected by the war. Hardly anybody is affected by the drift toward authoritarianism.

And there is a fairly large group of people who do pay attention, but they still treat the GOP as if it has a shred of credibility left--some of the folks at Donklephant or the fans of Andrew Sullivan come to mind. They think it's the fairminded, grownup thing to do--give them a fair hearing. If they lived in Italy in the thirties, they would have given Mussolini a fair hearing, and called the rest of us Mussoline haters as Sullivan called critics of Bush before his own late realization about who this man was. Most of these people accept the power constellation as it currently exists, and as a result buy into its narrative no matter how speciously based and won't give it up until the evidence is overwhelming. They want to believe the people in power, and the MSM narrative reinforces them in this basic inclination.

They exaggerate the threat from the left to justify their leaning toward the right. They won't give Nader or Chomsky a fair hearing, but they'll listen to any kind of b.s. coming from the Republicans because many of them are libertarian types and think of themselves as "not-liberals" and really like what they hear from the Republicans even though what they say has little connection to what their policies actually effect.

Matt, I read your article this morning in PI opinion section--it got some pretty big ink in the print edition. Here's the link for others who might be interested to read it: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/309740_focus01.html

[Noodles]

Interesting isn't it? How that none of what Bush has "accomplished" for himself and his cronies; things like invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and threatening to hit Iran as well, HUGE obscene tax breaks for the hyper-rich, etc. would have been remotely possible without the divine coincidence of 911.
Could they have? Probably...sure.
Would they?
Uhhhh.....yea, probably....sure!