Within the Margin

On Sunday, Facebook and Instagram alerted me to the two-year anniversary of the launch of Ready for Hillary – Hillary Clinton’s Super PAC for the 2016 election. It’s exciting because she’s a giant on the American political landscape, and I have found droves of people who have been inspired by her and anticipate great things from a Hillary Clinton presidency.

But since its launch, Ready for Hillary has also felt like a march toward inevitable nomination. When a leading voice of the grassroots left weighs in over a year before the first caucus and primary votes are cast – as Howard Dean did last month in Politico – there is clearly interest from unexpected places in accelerating a candidate selection process that needs some time and thought, and we need to step back and make sure we’re thinking this through. I want the right kind of Hillary Clinton candidacy. I think we can get it, but I’m not taking it for granted.

Let’s quickly dispense with the obvious: no one can question the strength of her resume: from playing an active role in White House policy in the ’90s to eight years in the Senate to four years as Secretary of State, she is incredibly versed in policy foreign and domestic and in both the legislative and executive branches of government. Preparation is not in doubt here. But Hillary Clinton still needs to make the case for why she should be the Democratic nominee for president. It has to be more than her historic significance as potentially the first woman to become a major-party presidential nominee, because there are plenty of women who would make fantastic nominees. If we’re into the idea of Hillary as trailblazer – and I am into that: I am ashamed of the lack of women in Congress, in state legislatures, in the White House, and I’ve long wondered if we need to institute gender quotas like in various countries around the world – then why not Kirsten Gillibrand, with a few hard-fought legislative victories already under her belt and major initiatives in progress despite an era of do-nothingism in Congress? She was rewarded with a state-record 72% of New York’s vote in her last race. Or Amy Klobuchar, whose comprehensive efforts on energy policy resonate in both economic and environmental terms and are decidedly 21st-century in their focus – and who in 2012 won 85 out of 87 counties in a state that we still often count as swingy? Or despite her brief time in public office, Elizabeth Warren, with a coherent message about the things that created a financial crisis and the risky steps we’re taking toward repeating them? That’s just to name Democratic candidates; the lengthy list of expected Republican candidates currently lacks any women, but that could yet change and hopefully will (he said, without holding his breath for the slightest length of time).

And if it’s a matter of checking off the philosophical boxes, well…we’re not really sure, are we? We don’t have any reason to believe Hillary would be more aggressive in prosecuting Wall Street for its ongoing offenses against the less-moneyed citizens of this country. Suspicion of Wall Street types has never been a hallmark of the Clinton family. The Iraq invasion in 2003 was a major mistake: as a rule we probably shouldn’t launch wars on false pretenses, or that curtail our military readiness to complete an existing and more pressing mission in Afghanistan, or that exhaust our country’s patience and send us spiraling toward isolationist sentiments now shared by large swaths of right and left – hence our uncertain responses to more recent conflicts in Libya and Syria. The first two were obvious at the time of her vote, and the third was frankly predictable to those of us with any awareness of our nation’s history when it comes to supporting ongoing involvement in wars. It was a three-part mistake that Hillary has never acknowledged. And did she acknowledge this mistake? The one where she seemed, intentionally or not, to imply that hard-working Americans are white Americans, and that maybe non-white Americans are not? Not a pleasant moment in her 2008 candidacy.

I readily concede that asking any major party nominee to mount a populist war on banks is unrealistic – though I’d happily take a pass on the rhetoric and settle for a quiet sequence of legal prosecutions and major reforms. The Iceland model is just fine with me, and I would welcome a Hillary Clinton candidacy that talks about these kinds of measures, as opposed to the derivative regulation rollback we just saw from our lame-duck Congress. As for foreign policy, her hawkishness has not changed since the Bush administration and I have no reason from her statements to believe it will, so I have to worry that her presidency would likewise focus on the wrong enemy at the wrong time, leaving us unable to respond nimbly to other crises.

There are positives on policy, beyond the resume: she started talking about student debt in her fall speeches. This is encouraging, because I’m of the mindset that people in their 20s and 30s are severely hamstrung by student debt, rendering many of us unable to fully participate in the economy. I’ll feel better if this becomes a key facet of her platform. The next step toward policy relevance for my crowd: start talking about the transit investments that will make more of our cities livable for those of us who wouldn’t mind commuting sans car. The better the transit in any given city, the more places we can afford to live in said city (or even outside cities). Yes, transit tends to drive up rents and property prices: but inexpensive housing is meaningless if it’s nowhere near where we want to work and play. We’re hearing any number of people talk about road and bridge improvements as necessary investments and (temporary) job creators, but transit has to be part of the mix or infrastructure benefits will miss younger people. And as is well-documented, any Democratic presidential campaign in 2016 is going to rely on younger votes, so how about the policies start to match the need? Steve Singiser is the latest to write about the first part (the politics); I’m trying to get the discussion moving on the second part (the policies).

None of the questions or criticisms above are meant to preclude my support for her candidacy! Not in a primary election, or especially in a general election where it’s easy to imagine the totality of her positions adding up to something much stronger than a Republican nominee in thrall with his (let’s face it, it’ll be his, not her) party’s various foibles like a resistance to financial regulation and infrastructure investment, an inclination toward climate denial, toward rejection of reproductive rights, toward mockery of the notion that ours is still an unequal society whether we’re talking about gender or sexual identity or race or class, toward cluelessness about net neutrality, and so forth. As a New Yorker, I’ve already voted for her twice (for U.S. Senate in 2000 and 2006). But in the meantime, I think she should earn it in the present: we need a dialogue and we need to see what kind of platform she begins laying out.

The whole “ready for” concept has always annoyed me a little bit anyway, because what I’m really ready for is to concentrate on the rest of the Obama presidency – you know, the one that Paul Krugman, writing in Rolling Stone, correctly termed one of the greatest in history. I usually don’t go in for Krugman’s more agitated writings, but he does have his strong suits, from the esoteric (such as connecting American readers to the ongoing demise of democracy in Hungary) to the commonplace (like assessing a presidency). And I think that part of having a historic presidency is defending it against a newly-empowered Congressional majority that seeks to destroy it, and that requires some vigilance. The president himself has sometimes fallen short in mounting his own defense, but last week’s State of the Union was the latest in a series of post-midterm actions and statements that recognize progress made and outline aggressive goals for building upon those successes. Oh, and it included this. You know, I had watched this a bunch of times already, and only now did I notice he winked afterward. He winked! I love it all over again.

So sure – I’m ready for Hillary, but I’m not Ready For Hillary™. I’m just as ready for Elizabeth or Kirsten or Amy. I’m probably ready for Deval or ‘Loop or Martin, too, though I think it would be hella good for this country to have a female president. And I’m quite ready for someone coming from outside the elected realm, though the Obama presidency has demonstrated that a degree of political nuance is important to the job, or at least to beltway perceptions of one’s skill set for the role. There’s plenty of time for the nomination campaign to get started, but in the meantime Democrats need to figure out how to operate in a world where Republicans hold some very important cards at the legislative table and where last month’s split budget vote indicates that we have a competition between pragmatism and populism pulling at our Congressional delegation. How that unfolds in the coming months is surely as important as how the next few steps of Hillary’s campaign-in-waiting play out.