Twitter Essay: The #Obama legacy and the #democraticprimary

The Democratic debate has taken a predictable turn, though it is one not seen in generations. For the first time in my memory on the Democratic side, we have presidential candidates who are not seeking to distance themselves from the incumbent president.

While Hillary Clinton is using Bernie Sanders’ words to imply that Sanders is not just critical of some of Obama’s positions, but that his critiques amount to the same kind of attacks being launched by the Republicans. This is absurd, of course — there is a difference both in tone and substance here that is important for Democratic voters to understand, and Clinton’s elision of those differences is disingenuous — though Sanders’ response, that he has been a supporter of the president, is only partially true.

I started tweeting about this earlier today, tied to an article in The Washington Post that does a fairly good job looking at Sanders’ tenuous connection to the president.

These tweets, I think, when taken together can serve as an essay outlining my thoughts. I do add some connective tissue between the tweets for clarification and expansion.

Sanders’ is very much a realist on foreign policy, more dovish than Obama, and far more dovish than Clinton, but as this piece notes, he is not your average peacenik:

A President Sanders would govern more like a President Dwight Eisenhower, who refused to give in to the demands of the military-industrial complex even after the Russians launched Sputnik, and focused on nation-building at home rather than spending billions on unnecessary weapons systems. Or like Nixon, who cut defense spending dramatically and developed a health care plan more inclusive than Obamacare. Or like Obama, who not only reached out to Iran, but also has tried to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons, and who restored diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Sanders was right, of course, on Iraq and he is right about Henry Kissinger, but his approach is more complicated than simple typecasting would assume.

Clinton was the chief hawk in the Obama administration, according to numerous reports — and, as such, might be viewed as the “big idea” candidate on foreign policy. On the domestic front, she is — like Obama — an incrementalist, and might be viewed as a realist.

This is a judgment on balance — the balance sheet shows he has done more good than harm, making him the first president in memory to be in the black. Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam debacle pushed him into the red. Nixon, while doing some good, led by division and created the law-and-order politics that created the incarceration state. And Bill Clinton, while he oversaw economic growth, was responsible for a lot of noxious legislation — DOMA, the crime bill, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, welfare reform. Reagan and the Bushes are not even worth discussing from a progressive perspective.

They need to discuss what was good and worth building upon, what isn’t, what they would do in similar fashion and what they would do differently. That’s what this primary fight is all about.

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.
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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

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