"Kill Hill Politics"
Surprise, surprise, David Brooks, conservative commentator and Republican apologist, is a Hillary fan. Yep, on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Brooks said she was presidential. He let it be known that she’s the candidate who can win the holy grail of moderate swing Republicans and Independents everywhere. Hmmm, guess he just wanted to help her out.
Wrong. He, as always, believes in doing good works for his Republican henchmen. What better way to solidify Hillary’s front-runnership than to cast her as the wise man in the middle. The plot and the "happy ending" is clear. Brooks, Rove, Bush, all obsessing about Hillary because they want her to win the candidacy.
Obviously, they haven’t had a change of heart, mind or soul since their "kill Hill" days of yore. It’s just good old American political strategy at its finest in the post Rovian era. Here’s the plan: set afire the rumor that Hillary’s the one that can win, and then lie in wait with vaults full of spit-ball allegations ready to launch when the timing is right. They understand that she’s the one polarizing enough to bring out the still consequential religious right bloc who views the Clintons as the king and queen of depravity. They also know that a close election is one they can manipulate in the last count; all they really need is a down-to-the-wire tight race. Just this month Judicial Watch, the organization that filed 18 lawsuits against Bill in the fateful 90’s, has filed a lawsuit against the National Archives to have Hillary’s White House diaries released. They have taken them down once -- for many Republicans, they’re gearing up in 2008 with the hope that it becomes Clinton Season once again.
Call me conspiratorial, but having worked the 2004 campaign here in Ohio and watched our crafty right-wing Republican Secretary of State simultaneously police election decisions AND run the re-elect Bush campaign across the state, no fiction is wilder than the truth itself. The Dems have proven themselves to be either too naive, too passive, too disorganized or too much in denial to fight back. Even now, many of my voting peers are laying low during the primaries feeling it doesn’t really matter: The Dems are a shoe-in and, after all, any one of our candidates outshines all of theirs. Just the kind of fool-hearty complacency upon which the Republicans bank their future.
WHAT'S A DEMOCRAT TO DO???
Unfortunately, it’s not only the Machiavellian Republicans who are clouding our thinking and sealing our fate; its money, the media, and the good-ol’ Democratic Party machine as well. We’ve come to accept that the system is broken – where dollars trump all when it comes to politics -- and there’s nothing we can do about it. So desperate to find the "winner" we allow ourselves to be dumbed down by sound bytes while ignoring the facts. He or she who has the most money, the biggest megaphone and the tightest ties to party elite, rides the wave.
But what if rational thinking were to take the driver’s seat? Take a close look at qualifications for the job. Ask yourself who you would hire to run your family’s prize business or to operate on your daughter’s failing heart or to lead this nation during the most perilous times in recent history. You’d want to find someone with extraordinary real-time experience, a track record of success, proven good judgment and unquestionable integrity.
On those grounds, is any one of Hillary, Obama or Edwards truly qualified? Both Obama and Edwards, no matter their superb visions or high-energy passion, have had single terms in the senate, with no long-range experience heading committees or tackling a broad spectrum of divisive issues from start to finish. Consider their foreign policy backgrounds. Both Edwards and Obama have only new-comer credentials in international diplomacy. What might have been sufficient in a time of peace, wears paper thin during our crisis of war. Why would we ever consider handing over the reigns of the world’s future to so green a crop? Edwards was an outstanding personal injury legal advocate for close to twenty years. Laudable, perhaps, but totally irrelevant to the job at hand. Obama, a community organizer and local politician since law school, has a valiant and impressive domestic track record. He also has a great future leading on the national front . . . once he does his time -- as cabinet member, multi-term Senator, or even Vice President.
Hillary in a somewhat contorted way has the most foreign relations experience of the three. As First Lady she toured the world and got an up-close lesson on international power plays. Whether that qualifies her to lead this country in war today -- being the wife of a CEO doesn’t automatically make you first in line to replace him -- is certainly worthy of serious scrutiny. And the fact that she herself did not even read the National Intelligence Estimate before voting for the war in 2002, peppers the inquiry.
All this aside, can’t we do better?
This is the best opportunity in years to finally re-take the White House. Why leave it to either fate or the powers that be? Maybe it’s time for engaged voters to live up to the challenge and take a second look at some of the second-tier candidates. Whether former Ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson, or Senator Joe Biden, more than 20-year veteran of the Foreign Relations Committee and longtime chair of same, are better prepped for the job is a critical question worth considering. One look at their stories and they quickly rise above the pack. Richardson, for example, represented the UN in negotiations on the Palestine Israeli conflict and in 1995 negotiated with Saddam for the release of American hostages, not to mention that Governors notoriously make strong presidents.
And then there’s Biden, with his multi-decade on-the-job experience in world affairs, unmatched by the records of any of the contestants, Dem or Rep. His personal story is all about the kind of real family values that even a right-winger could love. He heroically thrived for five years as a commuting-from-Washington single dad after the tragic death of his young wife and baby daughter just one week after winning his first Senate seat at age 29. He then married a school teacher with whom he raised three children for the next thirty years, one of whom is now Delaware’s Attorney General and about go to Iraq as a member of the Reserves. If the voting public took a good look at his resume, they’d see Biden has worked with every world leader since Brezhnev, achieved true bi-partisan leadership throughout his career on foreign and domestic issues alike, and led the congressional Kosovo initiative that saved a mutli-ethnic warring people from genocidal chaos. They’d realize that he has just championed through the Senate the most strategic Iraq war exit plan to date, overwhelmingly backed by both Democrats and Republicans.
The problem is a man like Biden, doesn’t have the big bucks – he’s been a civil servant for over thirty years and was the first in his family to attend college. He’s not the party favorite – he doesn’t always toe the line and is more than happy to speak truth to power to make a point. And he’s not the darling of the media, at least not yet. It’s all part of the circular reasoning of primary politics. The media pays attention to the front runners, and the front runners are the ones who get the most media. Somewhere the polls enter the picture which drive both circles round and round. Add money as fuel for the machine and it all becomes a whole lot of spin with substance lost in the wash cycle.
But instead, what if "we the people" spawned the rumor that either Biden or Richardson were the ones that could and should win; that one or the other of these guys had the hard-earned credentials and broad appeal to reach into the ever evasive 10% pool of swing voters to pull out a victory. Now that would be a story. If we piped it loud enough across the internet and by word of mouth the media would have to pay attention and follow the scent. And what a dark-horse happy-ending legend it would be! The polls would follow the media. The bucks would follow the polls. And maybe, just maybe, reason and judgment would trump the politics of money and Republican guile. Just possibly the best person for the job would win and the Democrats would enter the White House with dignity in hand and change afoot.
Bottom line, why not make 2008 a true American experiment in grassroots democracy? Why not use the tools at hand to begin to fix the floundering system with which we were entrusted? After all, what do we have to lose . . . but just about everything?