This diary assumes that Clinton is the inevitable Democratic nominee and that she knows this. I focus here on evaluating how she is handling this new reality in light of the unexpectedly strong campaign Bernie Sanders marshaled and the political forces he (we) represent. I don’t care about who hit who first in Nevada or whether somebody is looking funny at somebody else.
How Clinton is handling this phase of her campaign reveals something troubling about her character that harkens back to her failed 1993-1994 attempt to reform the health care system.
In 2008, Brad DeLong wrote a masterful review of the book David Broder and Haynes Johnson wrote about Clinton’s health care fiasco, The System: Death of Health Care Reform in 1993-1994. DeLong was a Treasury Department official who had helped work on and push for Clinton’s initiative.
DeLong describes the essential political failing of Clinton’s attempt as setting the Clinton plan in stone, refusing to bring potential Congressional allies on board, being monumentally inflexible, and then using surrogates to threaten or demean serious critics — who could have been potential allies — when they unexpectedly demurred:
And the sense of betrayal was heightened among centrist Democrats as the Clinton Administration adopted a strategy of attempting to stampede rather than coopt the moderates. The worst example was the triple offensive--by the First Lady, House Committee Chair John Dingell, and the AFL-CIO--against Tennessee congressman Jim Cooper, sponsor with Senator John Breaux of an alternative centrist reform bill. As Johnson and Broder tell the story:
At a union-sponsored rally in Chattanooga, a copy of the "phony" Cooper-Grandy bill was ceremoniously burned. Unless Cooper changed his tune, threatened Jim Neely, the President of the Tennessee AFL-CIO, labor would either 'sit out' the Senate election or possibly endorse Republican candidate Fred Thompson. The most damaging blow fell at a civil rights meeting in Memphis. AFSCME... distributed a flyer that claimed "Cooper's plan would punish African-Americans more than others" and is "an injustice to our community." Cooper, the flyer said, has joined forces with the "health care profiteers" to offer "a fatal dose of phony reform"' Ellen Globocar, AFSCME's political director, justified the tactics: "Cooper probably did more damage to Bill Clinton's program than anybody.... We would get calls from the DNC [asking]... 'Why are we beating up on him?" And we'd say, "Maybe it's because he's trying to kill the President's health care proposal'."
Yet aggressive attacks on centrist Democrats--key swing votes--were coupled by total passivity on the part of a White House that seemed unwilling or unable to make the case for health care reform. They way Jay Rockefeller put it as early as December 1993: "I'm furious right now at the White House for several reasons. There is still no organization on health care. There's nothing out there.... The White House was simply not fighting back. There wasn't any effective political operation to win the battle..."
Does that political style sound familiar? In his review DeLong blames this blunder on Clinton’s main staffer in the effort, Ira Magaziner. And it may very well be that Magaziner was to blame. But we saw this same approach in HRC’s 2008 campaign — a tactical inflexibility backed up with (or perhaps caused by) arrogant disbelief that anyone could seriously dispute someone as brilliant and prepared as Hillary Rodham Clinton. At the time, most of us blamed this on the fact that Mark Penn was a dick, but Clinton was the one who hired both Magaziner and Penn.
And we’re seeing this same blunderous approach right now in Clinton’s inability to be magnanimous in her victory, to deftly handle Sanders’s continuing campaign (mainly by ignoring it or even agreeing with it) to make the alliances she needs but didn’t initially expect to have to make. To move on. Secretary Clinton is unable to respond in a sophisticated way to the unexpected challenge Sanders and his supporters developed.
Instead we get that Clinton is right and goddamned you if you disagree with or oppose her.
This unnecessarily turns potential allies into enemies. It wastes time nursing grievances. It does nothing to advance what she’s trying to accomplish. It reveals a troubling lack of ability to face politics as they are and to respond in a sophisticated manner. It bespeaks a self-destructive attachment to plans made that no longer fit the situation on the ground.
At this point in her life, it’s probably unrealistic to expect Clinton to change.
To use an almost worn out Rumsfeld analogy: You go into a general election with the candidate you have, not necessarily the one you need. There’s only so much you can do when the candidate is too arrogant, unimaginative and inflexible to be a good politician.
We probably should all be figuring out how to deal with this. That would be more constructive than the current dominant dialogue.