How should progressives approach and evaluate the Hillary Clinton campaign?
As Hillary Clinton launches her campaign for the Presidency this morning, new kossack but long time progressive Mike Conrad (kossack user name mconrad) provides a interesting blueprint for progressive critique and consideration of the Hillary Clinton campaign. - Armando
This overview of the things I believe progressive populist Democrats can do and keep in mind to be a force for a substantive and consequential 2016 primary is based on excerpts from a running file I keep. It amounts to a fairly narrow yet in-depth look at 2016's implications for the subjects I focus on: economic issues, progressive populism and Democratic economic identity. Feel free to adopt as little or as much of it as you'd like.
Part 1 - The Process
No Better Time Than Now
If an open seat presidential primary is not the right time to press very hard to define the purpose of the Democratic party then no time period will meet that criteria. There will always be an election at most two years away and every presidential and midterm is going to be important in its own right. Moreover, the notion that the road to electoral defeat is paved with a contested nomination is not supported by evidence.
Concerns that the protracted 2008 nomination fight would irrevocably divide the party and prevent it from prevailing in a winnable election ended up being vastly overwrought. The same will hold true in 2016, especially if the primary debate is substantive and does not belittle the coalition that makes up the Democratic voting and activist base or the causes that animate it.
Being frightened by the prospect of a Republican president is perfectly understandable. But Democrats do ourselves a tremendous disservice and in effect strengthen the very agenda that frightens us if we allow initial fear to breed timidity. If we don't want Republicans to win on any level that matters we can't cede the terms of the national debate to them or cower at the thought of the mean things they'll say about us.
Some will raise the specter of a primary that pulls Hillary Clinton "too far to the left" to win a general election, supposedly by "alienating independents." This positioning fear stems from the "centrist" score card theory of voters that confuses the small slice of persuadable voters—more likely to be moved by their economic conditions and person-to-person contact than positioning and endless TV ad buys—with a mythical political junkie "centrist" next door.
"Independent" is a catch-all and it catches a lot. It does not mean "centrist." Again think back to 2008 when “most liberal Senator” status was supposedly going to sink then-Senator Obama. In 2012, Obama lost independents in Ohio by 10% according to exit polling but still won the state by 3%. Obama received under 50% of the independent vote in swing states Virginia, Wisconsin, Colorado and Nevada yet carried them all. Lazy positioning punditry is easy for talking heads to produce but it has little value.
Democrats should accept that the shameless onslaught from conservatives will be ever-present. Rarely is the right-wing restrained by reality. We're talking about elected Republicans who act like putting on a Carnhartt jacket for campaign photo-ops every other November makes up for the fact that the conserva-fied version of the bible they brandish and seek to legislate is a few selectively chosen bits of the old testament repeated on a loop with quotes from the Wall Street Journal editorial board and John Galt fanfic interspersed where the red words should be. One could call the GOP extreme in the pursuit of their agenda and be right, but the pursuit of upward redistribution of income, wealth and political power is in and of itself extreme.
The GOP is going to be a walking disaster for the foreseeable future. And it's going to attack whoever the Democratic nominee is as the most liberal-y liberal to ever liberal no matter what that nominee says and does. It's up to progressives to decide whether we're going to let the right's inevitable torrent of charges dissuade us from having the needed debate.
As comforting as they may be, statements of opposition to various legitimately terrifying GOP figures from national Democrats do not imply active support for a progressive agenda equal to the moment. As Democrats often urge electeds Republicans, don’t just tell me what you’re against, tell me what you’re for. Primary voters need to hear both.
More on the flip.
Ready For Specifics
Hillary Clinton, the clear frontrunner for the nomination as of now, is no stranger to public life. But much of her career, by some of her supporters admission, is a flawed gauge providing limited insight into where a President Clinton would be on economic issues in 2017.
Examples from Bill Clinton's presidency need to be taken on a case-by-case basis. They're fair if Hillary Clinton's views on the issue at hand are verifiable. But just assuming that her position on something was or is identical to Bill's is perilously close to a manifestation of the regressive notion that women are “spoken for” by their husbands. Hillary and Bill having the same donor base, advisers and baseline economic and electoral ideas would tell us a lot. The fact that the two of them have the same last name doesn't automatically tell us anything.
Criticism of Clinton's votes while Senator from New York, like her full circle on the bank-written bankruptcy bill (from opposed as first lady, to voting for it in the Senate, back to showing a measure of contrition as a national candidate in 2008) is met with a reminder that at the time the deference to the banking lobby's claims she displayed was considered to be the norm for her state. I'd still call this level of deference excessive and destructive and point out that the 'interest with a large footprint in my state' defense is cold comfort to the people devastated by the bankruptcy bill, to say the very least. However, this defense of her vote is based on a view that was held broadly enough that it does seem to be casting a fog over Clinton's Senate tenure.
Clinton's '08 presidential campaign featured some good rhetoric and policy while also putting on display the parts of her approach progressives object to. Secretary of State is a position that typically keeps its distance from domestic politics so it's not a surprise that Clinton didn't say a whole lot during Obama's first term. Her 2016 campaign has shown somewhat encouraging signs but a lot remains unsaid and almost everything remains unsubstantiated.
If the Clinton campaign think this fragmented history leads to a faulty reading of her track record, that's all the more reason to be crystal clear on where she stands now. If there's one thing everyone from her staunchest progressive critics to her proudest supporters agree on it's that Clinton is more than capable of engaging in-depth on policy. You won't find "not interested in policy specifics" on the list of progressive criticism of Hillary Clinton. She surely has views, let's hear them.
When The Political Isn't Personal
It would be quite an understatement to say that there is no shortage of personal attacks on Hillary Clinton, ranging from the inane to downright vile. In this environment it's easy to see how progressive questions and disagreement could come to be seen through a personal lense. We already saw this when New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who is as associated with combating runaway inequality as any other elected official, said that he was waiting to see the agenda Clinton runs on before making a primary support decision.
So I’ll reiterate a view that is probably not unique among progressive/populist Democrats: You could put my favorite elected Dems in some kind of futuristic attribute-combination machine and if the resulting hybrid candidate was running for this nomination I would think it was a big problem if they weren't thoroughly on the record too.
Words In The Present And Actions In the Future
Some ask why what Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat says now matters. The theory of change here is not that Clinton says something populist and that's it, everybody can go home. If a candidate runs on certain themes and issues now it makes it more likely they'll follow-through later and harder for them to reverse themselves. But ultimately, what the candidates say now matters because progressives can make sure that it matters.
Whichever accountability strategy is called for later will start from a stronger position if there is video to back-up reports in print and campaign statements. To that end...
Let's Go To The Video
We need video of the candidates and lots of it: at town halls, in debates and forums, direct-to-camera, all of it. This is the case for every candidate but especially a frontrunner like Clinton.
The Clinton campaign might say there is plenty of time to get questions answered and there's some truth to that. But the other implication of the over 8 months time before Iowa Democrats caucus is that the Clinton campaign should be able to make the time to address pressing issues in-depth sooner rather than later.
During the 2008 primary, candidates addressed a range of progressive organizations on everything from health care to Iraq to the climate to reproductive rights. The leading candidates talked about the same issues countless times at their own events. And this is how it should be. It's the first step to making the democratic promise (both small-d democratic and Democratic party) of responsive elected officials on the side of regular people a reality. A lot of politics requires participants to be something of a broken record. This is especially true of candidates, for whom stating positions should be as natural as asking people to support them; the former legitimizing the latter.
Basic Credibility vs. The Billion Dollar Zombie
The Democratic conversation has shifted away from pursuit of cruel, needless, politically disastrous benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare. We're now talking about good ideas like scrapping the cap and Social Security expansion to avert a looming retirement security crisis, and Medicare Access proposals like putting a buy-in the on ACA exchanges and lowering the eligibility age.
But at the same time, we know that billion dollar zombies die hard. So for a 2016 Democrat to even begin to have populist credibility there's a basic thing they must first do: a public, emphatic, specific rejection of hedge fund billionaire Peter Peterson's billion dollar campaign to mislead people into supporting Social Security and Medicare benefit cuts or worse. Specifically, on Social Security candidates must reject chained CPI—a stealth benefit cut designed to be a stealth benefit cut based on zero evidence that it's a more accurate index for the elderly who need COLAs to live—and raising the the retirement age. On Medicare, candidates need to reject the backwards, lethal idea of raising the eligibility age.
Recent history show us why it's not enough for a candidate to reject the Peterson agenda items in isolation. A variety of spurious trades have been floated in the past as vehicles for the plutocratic holy grail of maiming social insurance. A credible populist will grasp and affirm the case against the specific deforms and reject covert means to the same end, precluding a future line about how in a perfect world they might even be open to expansion but due to some false choice pretext they're now open to assaults on retirement security.
If this seems like fighting the last battle, note that chained CPI's supporters pushed it in the context of tax rates, education, infrastructure, and even with a risible stated goal of enabling debate about immigration and climate change. If Democrats have a rough 2018 midterm, the usual suspects might again (nonsensically) claim the answer is some sweet, sweet pandering to Peter Peterson.
Peterson's ideas are deeply unpopular but their professional advocates (there is no other kind) seek to compensate for their lack of public support with money and sympathetic media coverage. It's not a coincidence that ideas whose voting constituency could fit inside the monocle admiration chamber of Baron von Born-On-Third's mansion has a dedicated following among silver spoon case pundits.
Ensuring the zombie is dead for the duration would preclude the massive opportunity cost that occurs when these idea can be credibly floated, tying up progressives who could be doing other things. A candidate who is genuinely willing to have progressives make them do good things would not hamstring said progressives. The candidates' actions here can be either a basic display of good faith or a giant red flag waving from atop an unmistakable warning sign in a sea of flashing hazard lights.
Opposing privatization is well and good but as a standard for a national Democrat it sets the bar so low that it's practically on the ground. 2016 Democrats should, at minimum, immediately and publicly kill the billion dollar zombie and scatter its ashes to the ends of the earth so that even with its zombie-like characteristics it can't reconstitute itself for the entirety of their presidency.
While they're at it, candidates should reject the Reagan era “entitlements” construct that deceptively groups Social Security and Medicare into one entity. The two programs have different purposes and financing. Social Security is a model for effective (it does what needs to be done) and efficient (it does it well; it's almost all benefits with little overhead) government action. Medicare has become a misleading way for those looking for cover for the benefit cuts they want to say “overall health care costs.”
SocialSecurityMedicareMedicaidInterestOnTheDebtMaybeSomeOtherStuffToo is a misleading formulation. Democrats stop showing it undue reverence.
For a national Democrat willing to make a clear contrast, Social Security and Medicare are possibly the easiest economic policy ideas to advocate and defend. They are (rightly) intensely popular. A candidate who is not willing to draw a bright permanent line here might as well just drop any pretense that they're going to do the relatively more difficult work of rebuilding countervailing forces and by extension the working middle class.
Getting every candidate to do their zombie-killing duty before the first primary debates is doable. And it clears the path for expansion as a key contrast during those debates.
The Great Adequate Debates
The potential for presidential primary debates to be awful is not limited to the Republican side. We saw this play out in the final '08 primary debate, a shameful event that earned its infamy multiple times over. Thankfully, there's a check on the potential excesses of primary debates in the form of institution involvement.
There seems to be a bizarrely pervasive sense that progressive don’t have the capacity to assert themselves in this regard. I couldn't disagree with it more. Just as a rough example, between the movement organizations (Campaign for America’s Future, PCCC, MoveOn, DFA, Netroots Nation); the policy organizations (EPI, The Roosevelt Institute, Demos, CEPR, etc.); advocacy groups (Working America, American Family Voices, etc.) and the backbone of the coalition (NOW, NAACP, NCPSSM, climate hawks, labor, Latino groups, LGBT groups, etc.) there are tons of opportunities to pair organizations with outlets. Specific forums hosted by the Center for American Progress' excellent Talk Poverty project or an organization like the National Priorities Project would be very instructive. I could go on. In short, there's no good reason why debates and forums can't be done in a highly substantive way. Forget any kind of 'first build the political infrastructure' excuse. It's built.
One of the most frequent criticisms of the 2008 cycle debates was that they featured too many candidates to enable meaningful exchanges. If Jim Webb joins Clinton, Sanders, O'Malley and Chafeee that will make five candidates, three fewer than the 2008 initial debate field and half the number that participated in at least one Democratic debate in 2004.
As far as the number of debates goes, by this point in 2007 there had already been two televised debates and a forum on health care reform.
A lot can happen in eight months. I think it's much too early to write off Sanders or O'Malley in the early states. However, conventional wisdom holds that there is an outside chance of someone other than Clinton catching on in Iowa or New Hampshire but barring that Clinton will have the nomination more or less wrapped up sometime in March. This would mean not just fewer debates, which is already guaranteed, but a lot fewer debates. Democrats need to make sure the debates we're going to have count.
There's a built-in response to any attempt by the right to game the referee and object to the progressive organization plus media outlet debate model. Conservative think tanks and Tea Party (aka GOP base) groups had events like this in 2012, including televised debates. Progressives defended it then on the grounds that primaries can be about whatever the respective coalitions decide they should be about. In the present cycle GOP candidates are auditioning for individual conservative billionaires. If they can do that, broad public interest groups should be able to be involved in Democratic debates broadcast to everyone.
No Side Issues, Just On Your Side Issues
JPM Dems like Andrew Cuomo have used important social issues, namely reproductive and LGBT rights, to establish a level of progressive cred while being weak or just plain bad on economic issues. This is a real problem Democrats need to be aware of, call out, and pushback on. Pushback works. See: Cuomo’s national aspirations.
But in no way does this ongoing project mean that social issues are “side issues” to be relegated to lesser-than status. Reproductive and LGBT rights matter. Economic issues matter. There’s no need or cause to denigrate one set. Likewise, it would be a mistake to assume that just because highlighting reproductive rights wasn’t enough to enable a steep uphill climb in the 2014 midterms that it’s not an important part of the mix in 2016 and beyond.
At the end of the day, these are all “on your side” issues. Are elected Democrats on the side of the rights of women and people who are LGBT? Are they really on the side of working and struggling people?
Let’s all keep in mind that it’s now 2015. It’s not too much to ask for national Democrats to be solid on marriage equality and runaway inequality; reproductive rights, raising wages, retirement security and reining in the financial sector.
Part 2 - The Party
Not Fully Litigating The Obama Legacy
At least as far as economic policy goes, the 2016 primary is not a good venue for a full relitigation of the Obama presidency in the hopes of coming to some sort of definitive assessment of the balance of past positives and demerits. This general guideline obviously would not prevent and should serve to put added emphasis on discussion of things that are yet to be determined like Fast Track and the TPP. And it could prioritize salient examples from the recent past that speak to underlying theories from the Obama presidency that progressives take issue with and don't want to see carry over into the next Democratic administration.
The Robert Rubin school's influence on Democratic economic policy at the national level did not start with President Obama. He failed to break with it when he had ample cause and the coalition to do so, leading his presidency and the modern Democratic party to its lowest point in mid 2011. But this all undeniably preceded the Obama Administration.
The New Dem mindset isn't limited to the national level either. There's a New Dem congressional contingent, though it's dwarfed by the progressive-populist coalition and somewhat limited by what a Democratic president gives them cover to do (see: Fast Track and the TPP).
One area a president clearly does have a “bully pulpit” that holds significant sway is with members of Congress from their party. We've seen congressional Dems change their position and go along with bad policy out of a sense of loyalty to a Democratic president both in the '90s and the present. This is why 2016 candidates are being evaluated based on how their nomination would affect the party's economic identity.
In the Obama era, the Team of Rubinites asserted itself on matters economic and political, pushing delusional ideas about pivoting to austerity and a "Grand Bargain" over more progressive voices. According to recent reports there wasn't even much of a debate inside the White House about the wisdom of the disastrous Bill Daley era. The insularity and influence imbalance reached extreme levels. For every Dan Pfeiffer there was a Rahm and then a Daley. For every Jared Bernstein there were multiple Hamilton Project/Wall Street/Robert Rubin school types.
Preventing a replay of this looks like a good fit for the 2016 intraparty debate. The fuller conversation about the Obama presidency, with all due credit and accountability, can continue on its own track.
Hillary Clinton as The Original Elizabeth Warren
I don't recall progressives rallying around a "Hillary Clinton's camp must claim she was the original Elizabeth Warren" standard but that's the one they've embraced, repeatedly casting her as someone who is no different from Warren on policy—and even potentially as much of a progressive populist as you'll find. The list of prominent surrogates suggesting there is no difference between the two or even that Warren was following Clinton’s lead the whole time includes Bill Daley and Lanny Davis. Combined, those two have probably repeated the complete talking point works of the DLC and Third Way. Now they're arguing someone is like Elizabeth Warren in every way that matters and that's a good thing. That's a massive admission of leverage.
I wouldn't be one to vouch for the complete accuracy of the Clinton as the Original Warren assertion. Critics could (and do) cite Clinton's vote for that bankruptcy bill Warren spent years in relative obscurity fighting. Or they highlight Clinton's more recent "foolish" message to bankers.
Critics could also point to Hillary Clinton's work, separate from Bill, with the DLC. This includes her call for a "cease fire" at a DLC conference (a call which required a remarkable act of strategic clock starting), her leadership of the DLC's American Dream Initiative and even her errant invoking of the term "vital center" (a DLC hallmark) in her 2006 Senate victory speech that set the stage for her 2008 presidential run. Let's just say that the DLC would have wanted nothing to do with an Original Elizabeth Warren. Will Marshall would have called an Original Warren every name in his arsenal.
Regardless of its validity, the Clinton as Original Warren argument should have substantive ramifications. Backing up the Warren comparison would mean endorsing ideas like the Brown-Kaufman Amendment and a financial transaction tax right out of the gate. Note that Warren recently laid out a comprehensive financial reform, agenda. And who would a President Hillary Clinton have in mind for Treasury Secretary? If Clinton is in fact, at least now, a lot like Warren on these issues it follows that Senators like Warren, Sherrod Brown and Tammy Baldwin would like the names on Clinton's short list.
Warren has been willing to make Wall Street furious on numerous occasions. They despise her the way a bully holds a grudge against the student who stands up to their lunch money theft operation and showed others it was possible. Hillary Clinton has a much different relationship with Wall Street. We're fooling ourselves if we think the difference between Wall Street's attitude toward Clinton and their hatred for Warren is only about rhetorical choice or that, as Gene Sperling asserts, there's a much less confrontational way to say essentially the same thing and get to basically the same place.
Profiles in Unicorn-Chasing: Plutocrat-Friendly Populism
Sperling in an NYT story on Clinton and Warren's populism:
Mrs. Clinton “wakes up asking how she can accomplish real things for families, not who she can attack,” said Gene B. Sperling, an economic adviser in the Clinton and Obama administrations. He added, “When she shows that fighting populist edge, it is for a purpose.”
If Sperling wants to take the ahistorical view and argue against the necessity of confrontation he should go for it, but to argue populists see confrontation as its own end is to miss an explicit point entirely. If powerful interests are hurting said families (and they are) then they need to be confronted. Happy talk is powerless against power.
Sperling's view dovetails with a belief that Democrats just need to sit down with the existing stakeholders (read: powerful interests) who are assumed to be operating with good intent. The theory goes that if Democrats do this, smile and say "This is my reasonable face" then surely good policy in the public interest will emerge. The track record of this theory is abysmal.
Anything a Democrat says that strikes a chord will be condemned as "class warfare" by modern day economic royalists. This is how it has always been. This debates isn't really about appropriate language, it's about power and leverage. What really offends Wall Street is the notion that they should be held accountable or have their power challenged. Most of the other complaints are a proxy for that. On a practical level, chasing the unicorn of plutocrat-friendly populism means forswearing accurate statements that resonate with voters. What exactly would be the point of that kind of ostensibly strategic thinking? Because it's clearly not winning elections, persuading or mobilizing.
Wall Street donors are liable to freak out all manner of things. They react with offended horror to the suggestion that they're anything less than genius. Do you remember their role in inflating or missing a giant housing bubble? How dare you. How dare anyone have the temerity to repeat back to them what they said and did. Whiners on Wall Street want a story without villains even when real life villains exists. They want rhetoric without resonance. They want to try to take the politics out of politics. They get almost everything they want in life. This should be one of the rare exceptions.
Bill Clinton: Separating Man From Myth
A lot of Democrats associate Bill Clinton with his immense political talent, from his prime time speeches to his skill as a retail politician. When he is at his best, like when he elevated the moral case against Medicaid cuts at the 2012 convention, he is great. The partisan bond with Clinton was strengthened when he served as a recent counter-example that could be cited to denounce a Republican administration during the George W. Bush years. But for the purposes of the present and future, it's time to distinguish between Bill Clinton the campaigner and his presidency.
While Clinton's administration is not without positive qualities (SCHIP, EITC, Family and Medical Leave Act, etc.) there's a propensity to misread and oversell his overall economic record. His vaunted surplus had a lot to do with a stock bubble ('Kewl Websitez dot com will be worth a fortune, I can feel it'). Constantly touting that surplus reflects the destructive tendency to see the budget deficit as the sum of all economic policy virtue. A better takeaway would be that full employment is achievable, coupled with a recognition that there there are other, non-bubble ways to get there.
The Era Of Big DLC Is Over
At some point it would be good for the candidates to address the DLC approach to Democratic politics, much of which was been picked up by Third Way: the aforementioned "centrist" score card theory of persuadable voter as cover for the primacy of finance both in the economy and the Democratic party.
Some supporters claim Hillary Clinton is as progressive of a Democrat as could win a general election. Much of this thinking appears to be informed by misguided DLC-style political spectrum positioning analysis from the '90s. I've yet to see someone demonstrate how the economic ideas progressives and populists are advocating would cost a Democratic nominee in a general election.
Clinton's defenders may argue that to the extent she went along with the DLC thinking it was was a product of a belief that political viability depended on it. (For the record, it didn't, almost none of the DLC story checks out.) But if Clinton really was a DLCer of last resort, one would think she could look at the political imperatives of the present and decide that it fell to her to definitely end an era she never wanted to begin in the first place.
Third Way: The Wing That Wasn't
Some coverage of the battle over the direction of the party and the Clinton campaign treats it as if there are two wings of the party, each with representative concerns, to be delicately balanced to ensure party unity. But all Third Way has is money, boundless hackery and the fact that some of them used to work for Democrats. (The pool of people who used to work for a DC Democrat is massive and K Street is adept at hiring people with a patina of credibility to lobby people from the same nominal party.)
Third Way's agenda has a microscopic voting constituency and definitely not an activist constituency. If they held a rally they might draw a whopping total of 14 people not paid to be there. They're better recognized as a nominally "Democratic" arm of the Financial Services Roundtable with no commitment to or interest in anything other than advancing what Wall Street wants by pretending the country club speaks for the country. They're not a Democratic strategy organization, they're a Wall Street strategy organization.
Think of Third Way as very high-priced megaphone for a very few people. Third Way could lose every single policy fight within the Clinton campaign and it would help create unity among the people who vote and work to elect a Democratic president. Hedge fund managers funding Third Way and its self-"centrists" staff looking for justification for their racket would be sad but that would be about it.
Part 3 - Primary Partisanship
The General Election Case As Primary Criteria
There's nothing wrong with saying "at this point I'm not supporting a candidate for the Democratic nomination." Over the course of making that decision, remember that the reasons progressive Dems support the nominee in the general election make for decent primary support criteria. Who will make the most of Supreme Court nominations, defending and enshrining the achievements of the Obama presidency (namely the ACA and Dodd-Frank) and the lower profile but crucial policy levers like the Department of Labor, EPA, Department of Justice and Federal Reserve?
Side note: The Supreme Court is a perennial in the debate about progressives and the national Democratic party because it's a very important point. The argument that was made about the Supreme Court in the run-up to the Obama re-elect holds true as none of the justices who were possible retirements have stepped down. The Supreme Court is always on the line to a certain extent in presidential elections but that's especially true of 2016. At the same time, the Supreme Court is not some ultimate discussion-ender that renders all dissent or impassioned criticism invalid. It doesn't absolve national Democrats or partisans of all other moral considerations and we should be better than to act like it does.
Against Hillary As “Polarizing” Positioning Theory
There's a familiar line about Hillary Clinton being "polarizing" that often comes from "centrist" pundits but bleeds over to more progressive territory from time. It goes that goes something like this: She is so partisan and divisive that she could not get health care reform done.
The problem with this often-deployed example is that the failure of the '93 effort is better explained by the difference in the make-up of the Democratic conference in the Senate between the 103rd Congress that didn't move reform and the 111th Congress that passed the ACA.
The story of the push for health care reform in the early '90s can be told through the Senate career of Pennsylvania Democrat Harris Wofford. When Wofford emphasized the issue and won in a special election in November 1991 it marked the unlocking of the proverbial widow. When Bill Clinton and a Democratic trifecta were elected in November 1992 the window opened narrowly but only for a short time.
When Robert Byrd took reconciliation off the table the already difficult task became closer to impossible. David Broder co-wrote a book that informs theories about how John Chaffee and some Republicans would have done a version of reform For Bipartisanship, but this theory is sanguine about ominous developments in the Senate. The Clinton Administration had Democrats from blue states like NY and NJ dragging their heels. Bill Kristol and other movement conservatives were working extremely hard to keep Republicans in line, a task made easier by Minority Leader Bob Dole's decision to run for president. There are compelling reasons to think that considering all of this, it was reconciliation or nothing. When the November 1994 midterms swept the Democratic trifecta, including (narrowly) Wofford out of office any chances for reform that decade or the next went with them.
Pundits who lay the whole thing on Hillary Clinton's "polarizing" doorstep might make themselves feel Savvy but that doesn't make their story true.
Progressive legislative change has usually been a product of partisanship; initially ideological (Democrats and progressive Republicans) but then moving toward partisanship in the political party sense as the parties realigned post-Civil Rights Act. It's difficult to see this changing any time soon, rhetoric about happy purple places notwithstanding. A rare exception to strict partisanship is financial regulation, where some of the support for stronger measure actually comes from elected Republicans. This illustrates the need to be willing to pursue the kind of Main Street bipartisanship that angers powerful interests instead of the K Street bipartisanship promoted by the self-interested as the sole way forward to Get Things Done.
Scandal Simplified
As far as "scandals" go, I'd suggest there's a not at all complicated test for whether they warrant progressives concern: did something unethical or worse actually happen? Progressives are under no obligation to cover for someone who genuinely does wrong just because they're a leading Democrat. The "hack gap" is a good thing and if anything we should want a larger one.
But the standard can't be that as soon as the right finds a charge that seems to gain traction we label the Democrat on the receiving end "scandal-plagued" and treat them wearily. Any Democrat would be given given at least one Something-ghazi by Fox And Friends the second they win Iowa.
If someone credible argues persuasively that the Clinton Foundation did something wrong and Hillary Clinton was involved in it, I'll listen. I think others would too. Otherwise, this is all to be expected. Access money and influence is worth talking about and on that front Hillary Clinton has said some things I find disconcerting. See: Netroots Nation (then-Yearly Kos) 2007. Generalized "scandal" however is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Wake me when there's something real.
Fundamental Questions
The rather obvious but very important to get answered questions all of the candidates could and should answer:
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- Should the goal of policy-makers be Full Recovery or getting to and staying at Full Employment?
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- At what point and in what ways does debt become a problem for the real economy?
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- For years now Joe Stiglitz (a progressive economist Hillary Clinton's team has reportedly been in contact with) has been arguing that a useful shorthand for what has gone wrong in recent decades is that the financial sector should serve the real economy not the other way around. Do the candidates agree with this? If so, what's their plan for to address financialization?
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- For many progressives one of the most objectionable moments of the Obama presidency was then-Treasury Secretary Geithner’s “foam the runway” approach to housing and the banks. Where are the candidates on this? On a related note, what do they think of the Justice Department’s application of the “collateral consequences” doctrine to megabanks?
Candidates could also address prominent progressives criticisms of the national Democratic economic establishment. Among them:
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- They've obsessed over budget deficits while avoiding the more pressing deficits like the jobs deficit (distance from full employment), the wage deficit (productivity vs. pay) and the infrastructure deficit (what we need vs. what we’re doing).
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- They're engaged in the opportunity dodge.
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- They’re too timid and too focused on taxes and transfers after the fact as opposed to stopping upward redistribution in the first place.
The Cause Before The Candidate
As this process picks up, Democrats will gravitate toward certain candidates. Strong disagreements between people committed to the same values are bound to happen. If anything is truly inevitable about this primary it's the contentious moments that will come. It seems unlikely that some sort of solemn vow of unity now would prevent this. But it's also true that, as a group, progressives can redirect those arguments back to what we're supposed to be fighting for and over.