Frank Rich's column this morning makes much the same point about Clinton's campaign I made in this post last week: for all her vaunted experience and management expertise, the two most prominent opportunities for Clinton to demonstrate her executive competency were her heading the healthcare task force in her husband's administration and now her running the campaign for the presidency. Rich also sees the ineffective way she has run her campaign and squandered her advantages as analogous to the ineffective, top-down, un-reality-based way Bush has run the Iraq War, and I think the analogy has bite:
It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.
The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.
That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance.
Maybe the ineffectiveness of the campaign is more Mark Penn's fault than Clinton's, but even so, she picked him. And that choice tells us that she relies on the conventional Beltway politics that has been at the heart of the Democrats' ineffectiveness for the last two decades. It's John Kerry's cluelessness and out-of-touchness all over again. Will the Dems ever learn? Well, uh, yes. Obama clearly understands that the conventional Democratic establishment approach doesn't work and has crafted an effective alternative campaign strategy that has been executed almost flawlessly. So on the first head-to-head test of comparative competency and effectiveness, Obama wins hands down.
You pick the team you are comfortable with and which reflects your values and governing philosophy. Clinton's choice for a campaign team tells us that she will pick people who understand the Beltway reality but not the world outside it. Obama is hardly a radical outsider the way Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader is. He's got one foot inside the Beltway box and one foot outside of it--which is essential for anyone who is going to change the reality of the way things work inside the box. A total outsider can't do it; neither can a total insider. Howard Dean had that insider/outsider quality, too, but he didn't have the charisma or the communication skills to pull off what needs to be pulled off. Obama does.
I think it's fair to say that Clinton on the other hand is someone who has both feet inside the box. She has a typical Beltway insider's top-down imagination of reality. That's how her experience shapes her thinking and imagination, and that's the biggest difference between Clinton's DLC-style liberalism and Obama's progressivism. Obama is more instinctively a subsidiarist, Clinton more the product of the sixties/seventies style liberalism for which there is no problem government can't solve. The subsidiarist, unlike the sixties era liberal, is not interested in central government social engineering, and, unlike the conservative/libertarian, sees an important role for central government to play in solving problems the market or local communities cannot serve on their own.
But, heres the difference: the subsidiarist looks at government as the problem solver of last resort. This is an important distinction that seems to be missed in the general discussion among progressives and in the clumsy criticisms directed toward Obama from the right. His liberalism is not a watered down version of state socialism. Obama, I think, is offering a progressive-oriented governing philosophy that is fundamentally different from the conventional sixties/seventies liberal approach. I might be projecting a little bit here, and if it turns out I am I'll own up to it, but there are some solid indicators that I am more right than wrong about this.
So the subsidiarist sees central government as the agent of last resort when serious problems cannot be solved on the local level, especially when groups that have a justified grievance are in a relatively powerless position to rectify it themselves. Most sensible people embrace the principle of subsidiarity without even having heard of it. To take some obvious examples from the last century: Most Americans would support Eisenhower's having sent troops to Little Rock to protect the rights of the black students who wanted to attend the whites-only high school there. Most Americans would support the federal government's passing the Wagner Act to protect the rights of workers in labor disputes with powerful corporations that often had local government and the police in their pockets.
Most Americans support the idea of unemployment insurance and aid to impoverished children and the handicapped. Would it be better if some of these problems could be handled by families and local communities? Yes, but the scale and complexity of these problems in the destabilized society engendered by the creative destructive forces released by market capitalism exceeds the local resources required to deal with them effectively. So the wealth generated by market capitalism ought to be in part redirected toward those whose lives have been turned upside down by it.
The subsidiarist looks to government to protect basic rights, but not to engineer social reality. It's up to individuals and groups on the ground level to create their own social reality with as little interference from higher levels as possible; it's the government's job to make sure everyone plays by the rules and everyone's rights are protected. The subsidiarist rejects Jacobinism in all its forms. He looks at government as playing a support role for the people it serves, and resists government whenever it overreaches. It looks at the most important part of any society as what goes on at the ground level, where real life is lived and where the culture thrives and develops. Government should never get in the way of people living their lives except when any individual or group infringes on the rights of others. What is important about America is not its government and its power, but its people, their creativity, innovation, and their thriving.
And so the the subsidiarist is also interested in the question of government policies that promote the thriving of the people, and he would also argue that while the market should be left to allow people as much freedom to live their lives in the economic sphere as possible, central governments have a role to play in establishing basic infrastructure that insures the delivery of essential economic goods to insure the general welfare. Energy, transportation, the environment, food, housing, and healthcare are essential goods that cannot be left to an unfettered market.
No sane person who thinks about this it for a minute disagrees with the principle. Reasonable people can disagree about the degree of government intervention or oversight that's appropriate--and clearly government does overreach and does create unnecessary problems. That's what the political process is for, to debate and come to a decision about what level of government involvement is appropriate for the solution of specific problems. But there should be no debate about whether its involvement is desirable at all. The debate in the U.S. is confused because it is framed as either/or laissez-faire capitalism or creeping centralized state socialism. Subsidiarity is the principle that bridges the divide.
Again, the role of the central government in promoting the general commonweal is common sense, but not common sense embraced by movement conservatives and their libertarian enablers. The idea that the market when left to completely to itself without regulation or oversight will solve all problems is the most recent incarnation 19th century Social Darwinism dressed up in libertarian dogma. The fact is that the market has failed to solve real problems when it comes to healthcare and energy policy. The central government has to step in; the debate still lies before us regarding the most effective way for it do so.
But here's the point that I would make to the likes of Andrew Sullivan, a Thatcherite who feels a little guilty about his attraction to Obama's candidacy because he finds BO's "leftism" hard to square with his conservative principles: It's OK, Sully, just because he's not a libertarian does not mean he's a European-style socialist. Sullivan is one of these people, perhaps because of his British background, who seems to see the world in libertarian vs. socialist terms. As a result, he has clumsily aligned himself too often with the Republicans who, at first glance, seem to be more in line with his Oakeshottean political philosophy. He has finally figured out that Oakeshott would be appalled at what the Republican party in this country has come to represent, and that the real threat in the political sphere in this country comes from the right, not the left. Sully's a smart, decent guy, but his preconceptions have prevented him from grasping the real nature of the political crisis in this country.
I believe that he is slowly coming around to realize that America is not Europe, and that he has misperceived American liberalism through the European lens. There are top-down liberals in America, and Clinton represents that tendency, and I understand why he finds her hard to stomach. But while we can argue the point, I would say for the most part Clinton-style, top-down liberals have had little impact, especially compared to European social democracies, or where they have, they have been ineffective. Early HUD projects come to mind. The political culture in America will insure that they will continue to be ineffective. They pose no real threat except in the promise of continued ineffectiveness.
That's why it's important to recognize that Obama is not that kind of old-school liberal. Even though Americans (and even, perhaps, Obama) are not familiar with the word, he is a subsidiarist. That's really what's behind his instinctive refusal of mandates in the healthcare plan, and it's behind statements he makes, like the one in Austin last week, in which he said that he's not for government doing for people what they can do for themselves. It's also beautifully exemplified by his effective grass-roots campaign, which gives strong evidence that he understands how to change attitudes from the bottom up, which is will be essential for laying the foundation for building anything solid during his presidency.
So let's not focus on charisma and oratory as the only things that distinguish Obama from Clinton. Both claim to be change agents. The difference lies in that Obama wants to effect change from the bottom up, while Clinton remains in the old school liberal mindset of top down. We have ample evidence in the way both have run their campaigns which approach is likely to be more effective.
P.S. I think that a subsidiarist argument could be made for a single-payer system for delivering universal healthcare. It allows both doctors and patients enormous freedom and flexibility on the ground level--much more than they have now. The market still works on the level of quality if not price. Doctors are still independent business people, but they bill the government rather than insurance companies. The fly in the ointment is the fee limits. But why is it assumed that greed is the only reason most people do the things they do or that motivates innovation and excellence?
That's certainly a part of the American mythos of happiness, but it's one of the most debilitating because of the obstacle it presents to solutions to pressing problems that are a scandal in a country as wealthy as ours. Why should not the provision of healthcare, like the provision of education, be considered a good that rewards those who provide it with a comfortable living and with the chance to make a real difference in people's lives, but not necessarily with the possibility to become ridiculously wealthy? Do we really believe that those with the most brilliant aptitude for medicine will become bond salesman instead of physicians because the upside income potential is greater? Is that how most normal, sane people think?