Outside the White House in April 2013
The story properly begins on the day John Edwards dropped out of the 2008 Democratic campaign. I had been a supporter of Edwards, mainly because he was the only candidate who was emphasizing social justice issues that year. Obama and Clinton, for my taste, were spending too much time on other things. But with Edwards out, just before the caucuses in my state, I had to make a choice. There were only two candidates left.
That week, I saw a speech by Bill Clinton somewhere, and I had a totally visceral reaction to it. The strong feeling I had was that I didn’t want another four or eight years of hearing Bill Clinton’s voice. I had been a Clinton supporter in 1992, and had happily voted for him both times. But by the end of his second term, I was just sort of sick of him. And the way he made that particular speech made me think if Hillary were elected, I’d be seeing and hearing too much of him. So I investigated more about Obama (about whom I had had many of the doubts that were implicit in Hillary’s “3 am” ad), and liked what I saw. So I caucused for Obama, and the rest, as they say, is history.
I should add that I think Obama has been the best President of my lifetime (and I was born in Eisenhower’s first term). I like him, I like what he’s accomplished in the teeth of stronger opposition and worse economic conditions than he could ever have imagined, and I feel confident of the direction of the country under his leadership.
As 2015 began, I was quite worried about what would happen after Obama finished his time in office, and in particular that Hillary Clinton was seeming to be the only viable Democratic candidate. Some of this was visceral reaction from 2008; I still didn’t want her. Some of this was a basic fear that, with all the baggage that she carried from the silliness of Whitewater, Travelgate, the Rose billing records, Vince Foster, her commodity trading, you name it, she would be vulnerable to Republican attacks in the fall. These are people who turned John Kerry, a genuine war hero, into a liar and a coward for the purposes of an election; what would they do with Hillary Clinton?
If Vice President Biden had chosen to run, I’d have sent him a check the day he announced. I love the Vice President. I also respect why he is not running, and wish him well.
When Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy, I was happy. I liked the idea of leavening the Democratic nomination process with the ideas of a genuine socialist. In the first debates, I thought Bernie was spectacular. He was honest, he was funny, he was relaxed. When he waved away the nonsense of the email scandal, I really grew to admire him. We were going to have adult debates. I like a lot of things Bernie was talking about.
But things did not progress linearly in my process. Bernie’s reaction to the Black Lives Matter protest in Seattle (and I know more about these individuals than was reported in the national press; they are agitators with a serious mission and frankly the kind of political theater in which they engage is the sort that a young Bernie Sanders would have actively sought to adopt) disappointed me. Not so much because of what he said or did, but because he seemed to think that this was his time, and no one else’s agenda should be allowed to interfere with it.
You know who acted that way? The entire George W. Bush administration. They had a plan when they took office and they weren’t going to let something as silly as “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” interfere with it. But that’s kind of the point. Presidents don’t get to follow their agendas because there’s this actual world out there that doesn’t care what your plans are. Bill Clinton didn’t expect to spend as much time on the Balkans as he did. Obama would have preferred to be brokering Middle East peace with a more like-minded Israeli government than to have spent his time stopping us from falling into Great Depression II. To paraphrase a very evil man, who run the country you have, not the country you wish you had.
And you certainly should be listening to the people’s concerns that are there, not just the ones who agree with your agenda.
The other thing that happened was Hillary’s testimony on Capitol Hill. She sat there for hours and hours and didn’t give the GOP interrogators a single soundbite they could use against her. This had nothing to do with a continuation of a Bill Clinton administration; indeed, what she was defending was the Obama administration. What it showed me was someone prepared to be President. Someone who had mastered policy and had mastered her own demeanor (which she certainly had not as First Lady). This was a moment when she needed to learn to shine, and she had come through far better than anyone could have expected. This was someone who had learned from her long political career what she needed to do at this difficult moment, and had owned the stage. I was impressed. She felt Presidential to me.
And finally there was the Sanders New York Daily News editorial board interview. I read both hers and Hillary’s transcripts in full, so I wasn’t just reading news reports or edited snippets. I consider the questions they asked were tough to both candidates. Hillary’s answers were thorough and considered. Bernie was, well, let me explain something . . . .
I work with banks. I work everyday with Dodd-Frank. I can’t claim to know every jot and tittle of a huge piece of legislation that covers a lot of topics, but I know the parts about how it deals with the big banks quite well. I’m a pretty liberal guy (the banks I work with make fun of my politics), and I know that Dodd-Frank was a huge compromise to get through a Congress that both wanted to act to stop the abuses that caused the Great Recession and didn’t want to kill the financial system in the process. It contains a lot of very vague and difficult concepts, and some of that vagueness was intentional just to get the thing passed. And I know (as, say, Donald Trump does not), that the real risk involved in trying to break up big banks is that they have a lot of money and a lot of lawyers and are willing to spend the former to pay the latter, and there are serious Constitutional issues involved in breaking up big banks, and a lot of judges (most appointed by men whose surname was Bush) who are very liable to find the Constitution forbids some of the things involved.
Bernie’s answer on breaking up the big banks was no answer at all. This is the centerpiece of his economic plans, and yet he doesn’t have even an outline of a plan to do so. So, you ask, what might he have done? He’s not President yet.
Well, he’s got a campaign going. He’s got advisers. I assume someone could have outlined something for him. Let me give you one off the top of my head:
- Give Treasury and the other financial regulatory agencies adequate staff to complete all Dodd-Frank regulations immediately.
- No more extensions on “living will” requirements for “Too Big to Fail” financial institutions
- Staff up the Department of Justice and the counsel’s offices of the financial regulatory institutions sufficiently so they can fight for making the banks face the consequences already in Dodd-Frank for failing to comply with the living will requirements.
That wasn’t that hard, was it? Someone who actually might look at the statute might come up with a better idea, but politically the idea that you have to fight legal fire with legal fire should resonate.
Which brings me back, in some ways, to the beginning. John Edwards turned out, of course, to be a turd of a human. Bernie is not that kind of person in any way, shape, or form. But what I find about him is that he’s intellectually lazy. He doesn’t take the time to wargame how things might occur, and prepare to deal with it. Neither the BLM protesters in Seattle nor the Daily News question about the centerpiece of his economic plans should have been surprises to him. They weren’t “gotcha” things; they were things high up on a list that any candidate for any office should have expected to happen. And Bernie was unprepared for either.
Presidents, as I said, don’t get to make the choice of what will happen during their terms in office. And Hillary has shown me she is prepared to be President of the United States. Bernie has shown me that he is not.
I would, as I said, much prefer to have someone with views more like Bernie’s (and John Edwards’s) as the Democratic candidate for President. But there is only person currently running for President (we won’t even start on Trump here) who has the intellectual rigor and capacity to understand the job the next President will be required to do. And that is Hillary Clinton.
