For several months I have invested a good deal of time and energy defending Hillary Clinton from attacks on this site, and more recently I have defended Bill as well, once he became a player in the campaign and started attracting criticism. I've parried all kinds of attacks on them: that they're callous self-centered triangulators, that they have no loyalty, that they're willing and eager to appeal to our Dark Side, including racism, to get what they want.
But I am through defending them. I have thought about this a lot over the last couple of days, and I've reached my decision.
More after the jump.
I'm through defending them because it's a fool's errand. You defend people against plausible things--you fight reasons with reasons. You can't effectively defend people from lies and fictions--it only empowers the liars and keeps the fictions alive and kicking. Nobody thinks it's a good employment of their time to "defend" the heliocentric theory or the germ theory, or even evolution (except in specific institutional settings where it's necessary, e.g. when school curriculums are being voted on).
My apologies to any Obama supporters who thought I was coming over to their side...my apologies also to my Clinton-supporting colleagues who may have worried about my immortal political soul! I'll support Obama with pleasure if he wins, but I don't support him now. The rest of this diary is about why I support Hillary Clinton. (Sorry Bill...that's for historians!) Yes, dear (and few) readers, I've decided to go positive.
Experience
In high school we sometimes invite students to "shadow" health professionals or others who might represent good career goals for students. Obviously we consider this worth doing, even though the students don't go through any real training. In college we sometimes send students on internships, before they get their degrees or sit for their exams, etc. The idea of these experiential programs is to get students familiar with what they're planing to go into. The alternative is having them play doctor (so to speak) among themselves, or running a summer lawn-mowing business. Shadowing and internships are widely considered to be better preparation, although there's certainly stuff you learn in even the most modest self-directed settings that you can't learn when you've been plugged into a preparatory program.
Let's face it- the experience Clinton has, that Obama doesn't, isn't a few more years in the Senate. It's eight years as Bill Clinton's wife. That's the stated basis of a lot of hostility to her, but for some reason Clinton supporters are embarrassed to embrace it as the heart of the experience and preparation, even though without those eight years she wouldn't be a credible candidate.
I'm happy to embrace and trumpet those eight years. She saw it all (shadowing), and participated in some of it (internship), and while it certainly sounds like a joke (I can't wait to see the snark!), the alternative is something more do-it-yourself but on a much more modest scale. You're governor of New Mexico. You were a state senator and community organizer. You represented the little guy vs. corporations. (I'm leaving out Senate stuff, since it's a wash among the three and now two top candidates.) Those are all great things (super! absolutely fabulous! your relatives must be proud!), but if you value knowledge of the presidency and how it works, Clinton has it.
It's perfectly defensible to say you don't value that--I have no problem with that. What's less defensible, in my opinion, is saying that experience is important but Clinton's doesn't count because it came by marriage--does it not count unless it's self-made? That redefines the presidency as a reward, like a medal, rather than as something to be achieved for the benefit of the country.
Temperament
Clinton is even-keel: she seems to have a little edge to her almost all the time. I think that's appropriate for the presidency. I don't have a whole lot to say about this, except that it's preferable (to me) to being almost preternaturally good-natured, but prone to sudden bouts of petulance. Which all preternaturally good-natured people are...even Jesus, if I recall rightly. As for the other part of the temperament indictment against Clinton--that everything is so calculated and thought-out--that's a quality I will cheerfully take in a president. One of my first DK comments is one that I'm most proud of: this isn't a fucking game.
Policies, including the unpopular ones
She isn't afraid of health-care mandates (that's how you get everyone to do something-that's why it's called a mandate), and she's not afraid of taxes. Those are two points in her favor, for me. She's not embarassed to see government as a facilitator of peoples' hopes and goals, via programs and spending. She talks in liberal language, not as much as I would like, but more than Obama does.
As for Iraq, I wish she would give a speech about it, explain her vote, and generally clear the air about everything. Earlier today I wrote a bit in answer to a very good question by a now-undecided Edwards diarist: what the hell was Hillary doing giving the time of day to the neocon supporters of war with Saddam in the late 1990s? Here is the link to my answer, and another iteration of it:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
For those of you who say "she doesn't apologize because she doesn't think it was a mistake," I think you're right. She needs to say it, or say it's a mistake. It does get tiresome for me to keep imagining what her speech would say, and I use profanity a lot more than she does!
Electability and message
I agree with Obama diarists/commenters who say he might win by a larger margin than Clinton would. If I thought there were much chance that she would lose, I would drop her like a turd and join the Obamaborg--see my comment above about it not being a --- game. Clinton's happiness and place in the history books is no concern of mine, believe me.
But I would rather have Clinton with 52% than Obama with 56%, because she will win as a Democrat while Obama will win as a Democrat-but, the "but" having been amply discussed over the last few months, and even when it's discussed in adoring terms (as it usually the case) I think it's clear enough. If you win as a Democrat-but, the other side wakes up having "lost-but." I want them to lose--not (just) out of sour grapes, but because that's how we start to marginalize their noxious ideas from our public sphere. Sid Blumenthal is probably as big a sycophant as Andrew Sullivan says he is, but when he says in the George Packer article in the new New Yorker that Clinton is the best choice to start a new progressive generation in power, I think that's correct. She will get ex-Republican votes, but she'll make them renounce Republicanism and all its works, something that Obama plainly will not do.
Department of Symbolism and Vindictiveness
Let's say for a moment that Obama and Clinton are precisely the same in every way...except that they retain their actual human forms and personal histories. Obama's the son of a Kenyan grad student and a Kansan woman (I'm sorry, I don't know anything about her--my bad!), and Clinton is the wife of a former president. With one, you get the first African-American president, with the other, you get the first female president. As a purely statistical matter, our string of 43 white male presidents has been more notable for their maleness than for their whiteness: after all, African-Americans are less than 15% of the population, while women are in the majority. As a utilitarian matter of correcting a historical injustice, I'm with Clinton--again, in an "all things being equal" situation that is purely an imaginative construct.
Finally, vindictiveness: I want the wingnuts' heads to explode. I don't have much elaboration to make upon that point. They've earned it.