Blackmail?
There is a diary on the rec list accusing people of spreading a Conspiracy Theory that Hillary blackmailed Obama into making her Secretary of State.
First, let’s address this idea of convention dealmaking being blackmail.
It’s not. It’s almost traditional. I would rather let somebody else do the calculations on this, but it seems about a third of all vice-presidential running mates have been chosen as part of a convention deal to appease some faction that might otherwise feel disgruntled and not terribly helpful. For instance, Ronald Reagan’s choice of failed candidate George H.W. Bush as his running mate. It wasn’t a natural match made in heaven. Bush Sr. represented the more centrist and North Eastern branch of the Republican Party that Ronald Reagan’s hard conservatives wanted to push out of the party. You don’t generally hear much talk about this amnymore, but while Reagan was still president, they were rather condescending to Bush Sr. The great love affair of Bushes and Reagans was mostly a fiction created to help Bush Sr. continue Reagan’s legacy with his own presidency.
No blackmail. A deal to keep everybody happy on board. I doubt Bush had to say a word before he got his invitation to join. These things are usually worked out through intermediaries to avoid embarrassment if things fall through.
How about Gerald Ford’s vice president, Nelson Rockefeller? What happened to him at the 1976 convention? He got dumped and replaced by Bob Dole on the ticket. In 1976, it was the losing Reagan’s ultra-conservative (by 1976 standards) faction that was miffed about losing. And they, in particular, hated Nelson Rockefeller, the centrist, almost liberal Republican, representative of old guard north east Republican politics that the new and growing Reagan faction despised. Sort of a reverse of the GHW Bush situation in terms of who was being appeased.
No blackmail. Just the usual convention politics where the losing faction is thrown a bone to avoid a poo-flinging fight.
JFK and Johnson. How the hell did they wind up on the same ticket. Best friends? No. Party politics. JFK REALLY did not want Johnson, but the party elders warned him he better offer him something or things could turn ugly.
Every single one of these nominees could have left the convention with the nomination having made no deals. But they didn’t because it was impractical to piss off people whose support might be needed. You might think the supporters of the losing candidates should have offered their full-throated support for nothing more than party loyalty and the warm feeling inside of having done something good. But that’s not how the history of politics in this country generally works.
The losing candidate represents more than just himself and his ego and ambition. He represents a lot of people. Not just voters. All the campaign staff, all the people who endorsed him, all the surrogates that spoke out for him on his behalf, the big donors. Those people are still going to be around and part of the party politics after the nomination is settled, and they are savvy enough about the process to know when they are getting stiffed.
“But they lost!” you say. “They don’t deserve anything!”
A winner can’t afford to think that way. He/she will still need the support of those people after the election is all over. It would be too immature. Those of us in the trenches may think like this because we get caught up in the dichotomy of this good versus evil drama of the primaries. The pros know better. They have to.
That’s not blackmail. That’s politics.
Now… why are we even having to have this discussion? There have been posts (some by me) that said that even if Bernie loses the nomination, he has leverage going into the convention and that it behooves Hillary Clinton to cut some kind of deal the way Obama must have with her to get Bill and Hillary happy and all-aboard the Obama Express before it left the 2008 DNC convention. One of the sweeteners offered may have been the position of Secretary of State.
There is no proof of this. But I don’t think such a deal would have constituted blackmail in anyway or even been very unusual. If it is “Conspiracy Theory” to suggest this, then much of the written history of convention dealmaking is conspiracy theory, because we don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. We just know things like that at the 1976 RNC convention, after a very bitter fight, Gerald Ford dumped a man who really WAS his friend, as well as his veep. The story gets written as a convention deal, and that’s that. Historians can make their own autopsy after the event to see what really went down, and how many intermediaries were involved.
This isn’t really such a big deal unless you think it would be awful for Obama to offer such a position to Hillary. Wel, yeah… I thought it was awful. A lot of people were stunned and horrified, and I can post a few op-ed pieces here to support that if necessary. (I’m not very good at searching for 8 year old op-eds. Google likes to give you recent results for searches. Maybe somebody here with a paid LexisNexis connection can do it for us.) I, personally, was shocked because Obama had run against Hillary for a solid year with the primary reason for his candidacy being his opposition to the war that she voted for. “I’m not against all wars. Just dumb wars,” he said. He hammeres Hillary merclessly on her war vote, and she changed her justifications for that vote several times, only really apologizing for it when it was way too late to save her candidacy.
Yoi may think her vote was fine or that she had good reasons for what she did. Ok. But Obama had RUN AGAINST her on this and DEFEATED her based on this If she had called in sick that day instead of voting for the 2002 AUMF, I don’t doubt she would be in her seventh year as president today. That is why Obama’s appointment of her to Secretary of State struck so many people as too weird for words. Unless… there was some other business going on beneath the surface that we weren’t privy to. And thus there was a lot of speculation at the time.
Here’s what David Korn had to say in Mother Jones at the time.
If Barack Obama, the president-elect, wanted to pull a Team of Rivals play, that had seemed fine to me. And placing Clinton in Foggy Bottom would remove her from the dicey business of passing health care reform. Would it unite the party? Well, judging from the election results, the party is pretty darn united already. Despite the griping of a few Hillaryites at the Democratic convention, her voters certainly swung behind Obama in the general election (see Pennsylvania), after HRC and WJC campaigned for BHO in the fall. Unless an explicit deal was made between Obama and Hillary Clinton, it did not seem that Obama, after bypassing her for veep, had to appoint her anything for the party's sake. Still, if Obama and his savvy band of advisers thought that handing her one of the best jobs in the Cabinet would generate political benefits they could use to advance their agenda, I, as a non-fan of Hillary Clinton, was willing to say, okay--for what that was worth.
So, I’m not going to try to prove anything to you because I can’t, and I don’t even care if you are persuaded, because I never thought it was something that people needed to be persuaded of. I am amazed, however, that anybody today would take this as a right-wing smear of Hillary Clinton, because I see nothing smear-worthy about it. I brought up the subject as a Bernie fan, not to insult, but to position us for the endgame battle. Will Bernie-ites get some kind of concession from Hillary to keep the anti-war and anti-Wall Street factions inside the tent? It offended some Hillary supporters just to think that Bernie MIGHT get something out of this even if he loses, as if that’s unfair.
I, on the other hand, rejoice in thinking that a movement that never was granted even the prospects of a snowball in Hell in the face of all this terrible inevitability and math and superdelegates will be in a position to demand by our very presence and proven stubbornness some kind of serious acknowledgment by the establishment we fought against.
Chill, everybody. If you think your candidate is winning, enjoy it.