Bernie Sanders is taking a lot of heat in connection with his October 24 speech at Iowa's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. His critics say that he treated Hillary Clinton as no more than an adjunct of her husband, rather than an independent figure, when he used criticism of Clinton administration policies to draw an implicit contrast between himself and his opponent.
This line of attack has two large flaws. One is that the offending Sanders remarks arrived in the context of a narrative of his political life, beginning with his election as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, continuing through his career in the House of Representatives and on to the Senate and the present day; it would have been passing strange had he elided from the narrative his eight years in Congress during the Clinton administration.
The other, more important flaw is that in attacking Sanders for not treating Hillary Clinton as her own person, the attackers are themselves denying Hillary Clinton agency over the positions she took, during and after her stint in the White House, in support of the Clinton administration policies Sanders criticized. In other words, the Sanders critics are using a sexist construction to accuse Sanders of launching a sexist attack on Clinton.
Here's how Sanders prefaced the remarks that included his years in the House during the Clinton administration.
My political life is not as well-known as some other candidates, so let me take a moment to tell you about some of the difficult choices I have had to make, some of the forks in the road I have encountered in my career as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, as a U.S. congressman and as a U.S. senator.
That's plain enough. His long-time opposition to Wall Street privateers and corporate hegemony are well-illustrated by his votes against NAFTA and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act — the legislation that repealed portions of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, and in so doing supercharged the ongoing deregulation of Wall Street and the banks.
Those votes are an important part of his legislative history and, along with the somewhat less stark example of his vote against the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), stand in sharp contrast to positions taken by Hillary Clinton during and after her time in the Clinton administration.
It's important to remember that Clinton was not the typical presidential spouse. From the early days of the administration, she played an important role in developing and promoting administration policy. Although her public role in developing policy was dialed back after her ill-fated turn as the leader of the administration's health care policy task force, she continued in her public role as a policy advocate. To accuse Sanders of failing to distinguish between Clinton and her husband is to accuse Clinton of being nothing more than an amplifier of her husband's voice, rather than a figure of substance with a voice of her own.
And that there is sexist.
Clinton admirers point to her repudiation of her support for policies such as NAFTA and the invasion of Iraq as evidence that she is capable of recognizing and correcting her lapses in judgement. Sanders is pointing to his own opposition to those policies as evidence that he doesn't have to repudiate his positions because he got them right on the first try. On the issues he highlighted in his speech, he's more right than not.
NAFTA/TPP
Sanders voted against NAFTA; Clinton is on record as supporting it before she began criticizing it. Clinton's campaign staff point by way of exculpation to remarks from David Gergen, a long-time pundit and frequent policy adviser to Presidents (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Clinton), noting that Clinton was thoroughly unenthused about the administration's efforts to pass NAFTA.
Gergen, though, went on to say that her objections may have arisen less from a policy dispute than from her sense that NAFTA was siphoning energy from the health care initiative, and the campaign's reference to his remarks was prompted by reporting that she had helped promote the trade deal during a meeting with "a room full of women involved in international trade." Here's what Gergen had to say:
"I was actually there in the Clinton White House during the NAFTA fight and I must tell you Hillary Clinton was extremely unenthusiastic about NAFTA. And I think that’s putting it mildly. I’m not sure she objected to all the provisions of it but she just didn’t see why her husband and that White House had to go and do that fight. She was very unhappy about it and wanted to move on to health care. So I do think there’s some justification for her camp saying, you know, she’s never been a great backer for NAFTA."
Later during the administration, though, Clinton was unequivocal in supporting NAFTA,
telling union garment workers in 1996 that "I think everybody is in favor of free and fair trade. I think NAFTA is proving its worth," and using a 1998 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to
praise business leaders for lobbying in favor of NAFTA. In 2004, according to the Politifact story linked above, Clinton praised NAFTA while saying that enforcement of some provisions was not adequately stringent.
During a 2004 teleconference on funding cuts for job training, Clinton was asked whether NAFTA should be revisited. She replied, "I think that we have to enforce the trade rules that are inherent" in NAFTA. "I think on balance NAFTA has been good for New York and America, but I also think that there are a number of areas where we're not dealt with in an upfront way in dealing with our friend to the north, Canada, which seems to be able to come up with a number of rationales for keeping New York agricultural products out of Canada," she said.
Still later, during the Democratic primary battle with Barack Obama, Clinton's campaign said that "NAFTA was negotiated more than 14 years ago, and Hillary believes it has not lived up to its promises." So in public, she has gone from NAFTA is good and thanks for lobbying for it, to NAFTA is good but Canadians are weasels, to NAFTA is disappointing. Clinton's record on other trade deals during her Senate career is mixed: she supported most, but voted against CAFTA, the Central America Free Trade Agreement.
More recently, Clinton supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) as Secretary of State, calling it the gold standard of trade agreements, but she now opposes it. Unfortunately, she didn't announce her opposition until after Congress had awarded fast-track authority to the Obama administration, thereby greatly increasing the chances of passage.
Sanders, in contrast, has consistently opposed the agreement, and he highlighted that in his speech: "And let me be clear about the current trade deal that we are debating in Congress — the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That agreement is not now nor has it ever been the gold standard of trade agreements. I did not support it yesterday. I do not support it today. And I will not support it tomorrow."
Defense of Marriage Act
Sanders was one of a relatively few House members who voted against DOMA, while Clinton said during her first Senate campaign that had she been in office when DOMA was passed, she would have voted for it. She also said at the time that "[m]arriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time, and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman."
Clinton says now that DOMA was less an expression of discrimination than a defensive measure aimed at forestalling a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage. Long-time advocates of marriage equality are nearly unanimous in saying that Clinton's assertion simply isn't so.
Activists also note, though, that the Sanders vote against DOMA doesn't necessarily represent principled opposition to discrimination. Instead, he couched his opposition at the time as a states' rights issue.
Explaining his vote in 1996, Sanders’ chief of staff declared that it was motivated by a concern for states’ rights, not equality. Explaining that he wasn’t “legislating values,” she noted that Sanders believed DOMA violated the Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause by allowing one state to refuse to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in another. “You’re opening up Pandora’s box here,” she said at the time. “You’re saying that any state can refuse to … recognize the laws of another state if they don’t like them.”
Sanders was right in thinking that the law was unconstitutional but his anti-DOMA vote isn't, at least overtly, the expression of solidarity that he paints it to be. He
can fairly claim to have arrived at his current position in support of same-sex marriage well ahead of Clinton, which is laudable but not the same as having started at that point rather than reaching it later. Clinton's former support for DOMA, though, is certainly fair game.
The Repeal of Glass-Steagall
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed the House in 1999 with strong support from the Clinton administration. Sanders was among the relatively small minority to vote against the the bill. (He was joined, oddly, by future South Carolina governor and famed Appalachian Trail hiker, Mark Sanford.) Among the Democratic supporters of the bill, it's worth noting, were liberals such as Sherrod Brown and Elijah Cummings.
Along with other items on Wall Street's wish list, the legislation repealed certain provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act, enacted in 1933 to prevent repetitions of financial misbehavior that helped precipitate the Great Depression. One of the 1999 fatalities was the prohibition against the comingling of financial speculation and traditional banking, the practice of which predictably helped precipitate, in relatively short order, the Great Recession.
Sanders wants to reinstitute the repealed provisions, a position in which he's joined by Elizabeth Warren. Clinton does not, and neither does she support the Warren-McCain legislation, backed by Sanders, that would break up the "too big to fail" banks. (Clinton did not, so far as I can find, take a public position on the Gramm-Leach legislation at the time.)
Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq
Iraq isn't among the issues that led Sanders critics to cry foul, but it is representative of the point Sanders was indirectly making about Clinton's record of belated epiphanies on important issues that he got right. The pressure to support the vote that wrote a blank check to the Bush administration for the invasion of Iraq was immense. Clinton voted for it, and Sanders against. In addition to the lives forever damaged and the lives lost, here and there, and the ongoing disintegration of the neighborhood, the invasion cost us trillions and the price tag continues to grow.
Clinton eventually disavowed her vote, of course, but the awful consequences of the war can't be erased by confessions. Sanders may be suggesting that keeping Clinton out of the White House is the only way to ensure that her support for that war remains her most egregious misjudgment, but he's being pretty polite about it.
Some part of the hostility aimed at Sanders and his speech seems to arise from shock that he actually implicitly criticized Clinton, however civilly, by drawing these contrasts. This is almost as peculiar as the insinuation of sexism. Sanders and Clinton are contesting for the Democratic nomination for President, and candidates are allowed to distinguish themselves from one another on matters of policy. Clinton has a history of getting important issues wrong, and Sanders has a history of getting those same issues right (even if somewhat accidentally, in the case of DOMA). Voters might want to know that. Should the contest tighten as the primaries approach, the Clinton campaign or the Clintonite Super-Pacs will return the attention in spades, and probably not so gently.
Anyway: Sanders speech = not sexist. Sanders speech critics = accidentally sexist. Comparison and contrast of policy positions = okay.