Early this year, I wrote:
Sanders is a big picture guy. He has a great, broad, sweeping vision of what America should look like, and his campaign focuses almost exclusively on that. Meanwhile, Clinton is tactical, taking breaking news items and contextualizing them within her own political framework...
Those are both good things, as part of a greater whole. But where both candidates fail is in doing what the other one does really well.
By being big picture, Bernie Sanders eschews the details in exchange for a grand vision. It’s an effective way to rally and inspire, giving people an ideal to aspire to. Hillary Clinton is so attuned to what’s possible and how to get there—the tactical—that she’s lost (or never had) the ability to craft that big picture.
Let’s go back to that New York Daily News article, not to bash Sanders (since i have zero interest in that, and I hope commenters don’t either), but to further illustrate the style disparity between the two politicians.
We already know how roughly Sanders was beat up over the lack of specificity in his responses to the newspaper’s endorsement interview, but he didn’t need specificity. What was truly important for him was his overarching narrative, and he never let go of that:
Right now, there are still millions of people in this country who are suffering the results of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street. And when you have companies like Goldman Sachs and many other major banks reaching settlements with the United States government, as you're aware, for many billions of dollars, this is an implicit admission that they have engaged in illegal activity.
There’s no doubt that Wall Street remains in dire need of reform. You can quibble with the diagnosis (the problem isn’t that they’re “bigger” in terms of assets so long as they aren’t over leveraged like they were during the last economic collapse, the problem is that they continue predatory practices at the expense of the very consumers whose tax dollars bailed them out, and refuse to accede to a financial transaction tax that would help fund a bunch of great stuff), and you can quibble with whether breaking them up or not is the best policy prescription, but people are upset at Wall Street, continue to be upset at Wall Street, have every reason to be upset at Wall Street, and Sanders is tapping into that.
Who cares if his solution is or isn’t the best possible one, his prescriptions wouldn’t survive Congress (and maybe the courts) intact anyway. Point is, people know that Wall Street is in his crosshairs, and that’s all that matters. And that’s fine! Because that’s what people want—a president who will always cast a skeptical eye at Wall Street, and do everything within her or his power to make their lives a miserable hell.
Republicans do this well—promising the world to their voters, like banning abortion, getting rid of The Gays, liberating the oppressed from the Obamacare FEMA concentration camps, finding Barack Obama’s true birth certificate, etc. No one asks those assholes how they’re going to accomplish any of it. Heck, Kansas is teaching us on a daily basis that cutting taxes doesn’t increase revenues or economic prosperity! None of that matters. They have a higher ideal and they’re sticking to it—lower taxes! Family values! Strong national security!
Now let’s compare all that to Hillary Clinton’s New York Daily News’s interview, rightfully praised for her impressive command of minutiae. For example, here she is on too-big-to-fail:
There are two approaches. There's Section 121, Section 165, and both of them can be used by regulators to either require a bank to sell off businesses, lines of businesses or assets, because of the finding that is made by two-thirds of the financial regulators that the institution poses a grave threat, or if the Fed and the FDIC conclude that the institutions' living will resolution is inadequate and is not going to get any better, there can also be requirements that they do so.
Here she is on the MetLife court decision:
I am however quite concerned about the recent district court judgment overturning the regulators' assessment that MetLife should be considered an institution under the too big to fail rubric, because I don't think that the Financial Stability Oversight Council acted precipitously when they so labeled MetLife. And they clearly did their homework and came to that conclusion. And for a district judge to in a sense substitute her judgment for FSOC concerns me.
What these answers telegraph is that Clinton knows her shit. And not just on this, but on just about any policy issue, Clinton can recite chapter and verse of the relevant legislation, including citations. It’s an impressive grasp of policy, perhaps the strongest of any potential presidential candidate since forever. Well, at least since LBJ. (Or Bill?)
Problem, of course, is that she seems to have a hard time crawling out of all the policy details to paint that grander vision. You could really see that happening with the “$15 minimum wage” question at the last debate in New York. Sanders said, “$15!” and bam, he was done. Clinton went into excruciatingly ineffective details about the differences in cost of living between places and how $15 might or might not work everywhere blah blah blah. She was right! But it didn’t matter. Just fucking say “$15!” And if that gets watered down in some regions because of this or that, then whatever, you tried to get $15.
It’s the classic forest for the trees problem, because no one says, “Holy shit, did you see Clinton lay down Sections 121 and 165? Let me whip up a meme!” No one cares about Sections 121 and 165, and whether a candidate can properly cite them. Clinton can! And it’ll serve us well when she’s president! But electorally? That kind of stuff is a dud, particularly given that her savant-like knowledge of policy limits her promises to what’s probable, not what’s possible, not to mention what’s ideal.
But man, when she legislates, she’ll legislate like we haven’t seen in a long time.
Which brings me back to my original point:
Sanders is a visionary, Clinton is a technocrat. There are pros and cons to each, and neither is inherently better than the other. We complain that our party often lacks that big vision, so Sanders’ approach is welcome on that front. On the other hand, Clinton-style competence reassures us we won’t have a Katrina or Flint on our hands if she’s elected. Ideally, we’d have a hybrid candidate that could do both, but we go into the elections with the candidates we have ...
The subsequent primary has only reinforced that observation. We don’t have a hybrid, so we get what we get. Don’t expect to be wowed and blown away and inspired by Clinton. My 9-year-old girl is pretty excited about a girl president, so I think she’s inspired. But I’m not, and I never expected to be. It’s not going to be that kind of election. We’ll need to wait to have another 2008. Luckily, a president’s primary job isn’t to inspire. And on the policy side, we’ll be fine.
Well, except when we disagree. But if you were hoping for the perfect person who agreed with you 100 percent of the time, you were bound to be disappointed anyway. This is a system of baby steps, and we’ll get them, even without the overarching inspiring grand vision. And unlike President Barack Obama, Clinton is under no illusions that she can work with Republicans. For that reason alone she’ll be better than Obama.
(Still, it would be nice to have an overarching inspiring vision, though ...)
