Hillary Clinton and her supporters generally offer three or four reasons that the New York senator should be the Democratic nominee for president next year: her experience in the executive branch during her husband’s administration, her ability and willingness to take the fight to the GOP and her chances of succeeding in the general election.
I’ve always been a it dubious of the first — while she was more involved in policy than any first lady in history and possibly more than most vice presidents, she was not an official part of the policy apparatus and her claims to experience essentially boil down to her being the wife of a powerful man. I don’t mean to demean her abilities — which are myriad — or to diminish her real experience as a corporate lawyer, children’s advocate or senator. Oval Office experience, however, is another story.
Then again, I suspect that the experience argument is designed to do more than establish a difference between herself and her chief rivals — Her senate experience, after all, isn’t notably greater than theirs. It is designed to play into rank-and-file Democrats continued, and mostly irrational, love affair with Bill Clinton. The Clinton name, for Democrats, evokes grand memories of a time when they were on top of the world, a rebirth — except, as Thomas Schaller points out today in The Baltimore Sun, the Clinton years were not so good.
Yes, there was a Democrat in the White House, but the party found itself in a surprisingly precarious position at the end of the Clinton years, with Clinton’s vice president running a campaign that sought to minimize its connection to the Clintons and Democratic infrastructure in disarray around the country.
After the eight-year Clinton reign, the Republicans were in better shape. In January 1993, the Republicans were in the minority in Congress, among governors and even in state legislative chambers. By January 2001, they boasted majorities in all three. Plenty of Democrats who lost races during the 1994 “Republican Revolution” have painful memories of the Clintons’ early-term political blunders on gays in the military and health care reform.
Nor was much progress made in the 1990s closing the ideological infrastructure gap. After Al Gore’s defeat in 2000, the Clintons raised millions of dollars for organizations like David Brock’s Media Matters for America and the John Podesta-led Center for American Progress. But the failure to build these institutions when the Clintons held the White House must have tickled congressional Republicans already giddily constructing their formidable K Street Project.
As for Hillary Clinton’s ability to “fight the Republicans,” I think the jury is still out. “(F)ighting,” as Schaller says, “is not the same as winning.”
The truth is that Hillary Clinton’s win-loss record in political conflicts with the Republicans isn’t so great.
Yes, she handily won both of her Senate contests in New York. But her adopted home state isn’t exactly unfavorable partisan terrain, and her opponents were none too impressive.
And
Despite major policy achievements – the 1993 budget package, the 1995 Dayton Accords, the 1997 minimum wage increase – the Clintons had few political knockouts. Victories in the wake of the 1995 government shutdown and the failed impeachment attempt resulted more from GOP overreach than strategic, proactive haymakers thrown by Bill and Hillary.
In the end, Democrats need to reconsider their vetting process. Electability is fool’s gold, as the Kerry campaign should have proven. John Kerry was chosen because of his war record and the sense among Democrats that it would create a coat of armor that Republicans couldn’t pierce. Once they did, it was clear that Kerry offered little to get excited about.
Hillary Clinton may have a lot to offer, but Democrats should remember 2004 and be wary of candidates whose chief claim to the nomination is that they offer the best hope of winning.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
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Hank Kalet 