Now that Jeb Bush is considering a run to become the third President Bush in 30 years, why not resurrect the 19th century political John and John Quincy Adams dynasty?
Best System Over
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Between vast reserves of cash, her own giant Super PAC and a ground operation in waiting, Hillary Clinton appears to have the Democratic nomination for president in 2016 all locked up. So it’s unlikely that anyone will attempt, much less succeed, in challenging her.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: A Hillary Clinton Candidacy is an Incredibly Depressing Thought
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Women of a certain age are thrilled by the prospect of a possible President Hillary.
Over-50 females are so overjoyed that one of their own might finally achieve the nation’s top political post — better two centuries late than never — that they’re willing to overlook the former First Lady/Senator/Secretary of State’s not-so-minor defects.
Like her very long resume, minus significant achievements. Like the blood of a million Iraqis dripping off her warmongering claws. (She voted in ’03 for a war she ought to have known would soon become unpopular. What was she worried about? That New Yorkers, liberal as they come, wouldn’t reelect her in ’06?) Like the ugly optics of America’s first woman president having to be a former First Lady because we can’t find a woman who made something of herself on her own merits. Like the nasty truth that, aside from her chromosomes and body parts, she’s not one of them at all — just another slimy influence peddler. Not to mention, she doesn’t stand for anything, or have a vision that differs from the status quo.
For the rest of us, a Hillary Clinton presidential campaign is an incredibly depressing thought.
Starting with her much-vaunted Inevitability. Doesn’t anyone remember that we went through this in 2008? Democrats didn’t want her then; we don’t want her now. Can’t we do better than this tired old warhorse?
When I see Hillary’s chipmunk-cheeked countenance, I see old. Part of this is primal physicality, the sexist social conditioning that says guys age more gracefully than women. (How much you wanna bet that’d be the opposite under matriarchy?) But Hillary is actually old: she’ll be 69 on Election Day 2016. Her supporters point out that that’s the same age as Reagan when he took office. Considering the fact that the Gipper went senile in office, they might want to hush up.
For years, Clinton has played it hush-hush about her not-so-awesome health. This is one of those times, as with John McCain, where you’d have to pay close attention to the candidate’s veep pick.
More than calendar years, Hillary is spiritually old. She’s a throwback to another time, one that’s never coming back.
Like Reagan, Hillary Clinton is a cultural hiccup. Disconnected. Passé.
Post-Obama, who for his many shortcomings managed for a time to project a youthful vigor, an elderly President Hillary would mark a grim, dutiful restoration, a political return to the 1970s and 1980s, when she toiled as a talented if sketchy corporate lawyer. She harkens to the presidency of her husband, a conservative who banished liberals from the Democratic Party, severing the last connection between Washington’s political classes and the people they were supposedly sent to serve, never to be seen again after post-9/11 Bush went insane right-wing and Obama codified and expanded it all.
I don’t mind that she stayed married to Bill after he cheated on her. What’s unforgivable is that she stayed married to him after he destroyed American politics.
I hate Hillary — if you think about the million Iraqis she voted to kill, how can you not? — yet I don’t feel contempt for her.
What I feel is bored.
Bored, tired and sad. We have so many pressing systemic problems (economic decline, endless war, national purposelessness); is it really possible we’re going to have to endure another four-to-eight years of a presidency that doesn’t even try to address what ails us?
Because, let’s face it, there is no universe in which a President Hillary kicks ass. There is no chance, not even a remote one, that she is interested in decisive action on climate change (her “plan”: hope for young people to form a “movement“), bold moves to reduce unemployment or raise wages, putting an end to NSA spying on Americans (she’s in favor of it), or slamming the breaks on Washington’s kneejerk reaction to anything that happens overseas: blow it up (she’s really in favor of war).
You only get one thing by electing a President Hillary: a first woman president.
An old, tired, unimaginative, uninspiring, boring, useless, first woman president.
Yay.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and cartoonist, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Spaced Out
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Possible GOP Presidential candidate Marco Rubio, whose father entered the US illegally, says the US is full up, that there just isn’t any room left in the US for new immigrants, including the children arriving at the border with Mexico. But when you actually consider how much space there is in the country, that’s obviously untrue.
The High Price of Abortion Rights
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Hillary Clinton supporters are resurrecting an argument made by Obamabots to progressives: Despite her support for right-wing policies like NAFTA and voting for war against Iraq, liberals should vote for her because she might get to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court that might determine whether abortion remains legal. I’m pro-choice, but I’m nauseated by the thought that the right to an abortion necessitates voting for someone like Hillary Clinton, who has the blood of millions of innocent people on her hands.
Lemmings, Moths to Flames and Liberal Democrats
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Once again, liberals are being taken for granted by the Democratic Party. This time, they’re presenting the possibility of a lame, poorly-funded and thus merely symbolic primary challenge to Hillary Clinton from the left, via Bernie Sanders or possibly Elizabeth Warren, as ersatz democracy and a way to make progressives, whose concerns are ignored by the party bosses, feel less badly about holding their noses and voting for Hillary in the fall of 2016.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Schools Should Teach Nowology
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Everyone has a strong opinion about education. But the controversies are always about the same topic: testing, teachers unions, funding, merit pay, vouchers/school choice, charter schools. Is college a smart investment? Is affirmative action fair? Has political correctness supplanted the basics?
I keep waiting for someone to bring up Now. As in the study of now — what’s currently going on in the fields of politics, history, literature, mathematics, science — everything.
Can we call it Nowology?
From K through 12 through senior year of college, American education focuses obsessively on the past. No matter what you study, the topics either relate to the past or the knowledge is dated.
Since I was a history major in college, I’ll focus on that.
I’ve never understood why history is taught chronologically. A book’s opening is crucial; either you get hooked straight away, or you get bored and turn blasé. So how is it that textbook publishers think it makes sense to start a fourth-grade history textbook with prehistoric humans who lived 10,000 years ago? It’s tough enough for me, at age 50, to relate to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. How can a typical American 9-year-old, who lives in the suburbs, connect intellectually to people who foraged for food (not in the fridge)?
Another problem with teaching history chronologically is that teachers rarely make it to the relevant, interesting history students might actually care about — what’s going on now. From junior through senior high, my high school teachers got bogged down in the battlefields of the Civil War. We never once made it as far as Reconstruction (which is actually fascinating), much less to the controversies of my childhood (Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis).
TV, radio and newspapers — that’s where what mattered was discussed. My classmates and I had fathers who served in Vietnam. We had neighbors who’d dodged the draft, whose faces stared at us from wanted posters at the post office. We argued over Nixon and Ford and Carter, but all that stuff — the controversy, the drama, the Now — took place outside school.
The not-so-subliminal message soon sunk in: school is where you learn about old stuff. Now stuff is everywhere else.
This is, of course, exactly the opposite of how we choose to teach ourselves.
Example: pop culture, like movies and music. No one’s musical education begins with recordings of recreations of primitive music, simple claps or banging objects together. Most children start out listening to contemporary music — whatever they hear on Pandora, Spotify, the radio, TV, etc. Those who decide to dig further usually work backward. They listen to older works by their favorite artists. They hear a musician talk about the bands that influenced them, and they check them out.
(When I was a kid, friends were surprised that Paul McCartney had been in some other band before Wings.) They might wind up getting into ragtime or Bach. Last. Not first.
Ditto for movies. No one starts out watching silent films.
There is some discussion of teaching history in reverse chronological order in other countries. Writing in the UK Prospect last year, Christopher Fear of the University of Exeter argues: “We should begin by showing children how to scratch the surface to find the recent pasts of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations — pasts which they can talk about together.” But the British too continue to teach history the boring/chronological way.
We’re constantly worrying about whether our schools are preparing children to compete in the global marketplace. To support their calls for reform, activists (mostly, but not exclusively, on the political right) point to surveys that show that Americans are woefully ignorant about basic facts such as evolution, essential geographic knowledge as the location of the country where U.S. troops have been fighting, killing and dying for a decade and a half, and even heliocentricity.
Sure, it would be nice if more Americans cracked open a newspaper (or its online edition) now and then. On the other hand, a lot of this material ought to be taught in schools — and it isn’t. Day one of American history class should begin with Obama, Congressional paralysis, the early jockeying for the 2016 presidential campaign, America’s clash with Russia over Ukraine, and the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. All of these subjects naturally require digging deeper, back in time, to explain why and how what’s going on now is happening.
And it’s not just history. Studying physics at Columbia in the 1980s, no one taught us about the latest advances in cosmology and quantum mechanics — some of which, ironically, were being discovered in labs in the same buildings by the same professors who were filling our heads with obsolete material.
Nowology: better late than never.
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COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Ready for Hillary?
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We’ve had a black president who disappointed us. Is America ready for a woman president who disappoints us?
SYNDICATED COLUMN: What Would President Hillary Do? She’ll Be the First Woman President.
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Hillary is the talk of 2016. Will she run? According to the pundit class whose water cooler speculation gets repackaged as “conventional wisdom,” the nomination is the former First Lady’s for the asking. Following a coronation that saves her cash and bruising primary battles, it’s currently hard to conjure a Republican who can stop her from taking the general election too.
But to paraphrase a recent viral music video, there’s one thing that no one knows:
What would President Clinton II do?
I posed this question to “Ready for Hillary,” the main pro-Hillary Super PAC. “Ready for Hillary focuses on grassroots organizing, not policy,” replied Seth Bringman. “Policy decisions would be up to the campaign if Hillary runs, which we are certainly encouraging her to do. We amplify the causes Hillary is advocating for and spread the word to our more than one-and-a-half million supporters. We have done so when Hillary spoke out on immigration reform, health care, voting rights, unemployment insurance, and the government shutdown.”
Given that the pre-primary season doesn’t begin for another 18 months, it’s a little early to expect a fully fleshed-out policy platform from a probable candidate. But HRC isn’t a fresh young thing. She’s been kicking around politics for decades — so it’s more than a little strange that neither her fans nor her enemies has a clue what she’d do about a host of issues.
Long before 2000, Al Gore’s longstanding interest in climate change signaled that the environment would have been a priority in his administration. Beginning with his testimony in the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings, John Kerry’s career path predicted a preference for diplomacy over war. On the other hand, it was similarly clear long before 2008 that a John McCain Administration would have been belligerent and quirky, featuring occasional alliances of convenience with Democrats.
So, what about Hill? The only agenda item anyone could have reasonably predicted was a revival of HillaryCare — which is now basically Obamacare. The biggest arrow in her quiver is gone.
Ready for Hillary says it has raised $4 million from 33,000 donors during 2013. That’s a lot of money. You’d think the donors would know what they’re buying, but if that’s the case, they’re keeping it to themselves.
Hillary leads every poll of the Democratic field for 2016. But why? What is it about her that makes some liberal voters swoon?
I combed the Internet looking for signs of something approximating a political agenda. I pushed out the following question to social networks: “Support Hillary for 2016? Can you tell me what she would DO?”
The closest approximation to an answer came back: “She would be the first woman president.”
Yeah, we knew that — but would she be a first woman president who fires drones at wedding parties, or a first woman president who pushes for a $20/hour minimum wage, or a first woman president who continues the first black president’s policy of not using government to try to create jobs? Would she be a first woman president who closes Guantánamo? Would she be a first woman president who continued NSA spying on Americans? Would she be a first woman president who adds a public option to the Affordable Care Act?
As far as I can tell, the (Democratic) arguments for Hillary boil down to the following talking points:
- Unlike Obama, who let himself get rolled by the Republicans, Hillary is tough and battle-tested. She’s a good negotiator.
- She’s an experienced manager. “Ready on day one,” she argued in 2008. She knows everyone and everything in government.
- Like her husband, she’s somewhat more liberal than Obama.
- She’s pre-disastered, thus electable. If there were any more Travelgates, Whitewaters, etc., the media would have uncovered them by now.
These are personality traits, not prescriptions for America.
Hillary Clinton isn’t a candidate — she’s a brand. She doesn’t offer a set of ideas; she projects a vague sense of competence that feels absent in the current White House. (Didn’t she used to hold some kind of big job in that place?) Despite having held high posts in government, she can’t point to a single major legislative or ideological achievement — but that doesn’t matter to her supporters.
Mostly, Hillary represents the potentiality of a historical symbol: first woman president. As soon as she takes the oath of office, her campaign’s biggest goal, shattering the ultimate political glass ceiling, will have been achieved.
If this feels familiar, it should. Senator Barack Obama was Clinton in 2006 and 2007, projecting calm after long post-9/11 years of jittery Bushisms, with a light resume that served as a blank slate, allowing people to project their hopes and ideals upon him. In the end, all that mattered was the beginning: winning as a black man. For the Obamabots, all that followed — protecting Bush’s torturers, the bankster bailouts, the drones, the NSA — was beside the point of their politics of identitarian symbolism.
What will happen to the long-term unemployed under Hillary? If 2008 serves as a guide, the 2016 campaign will pass without Americans much talking or thinking about such questions.
(Support independent journalism and political commentary. Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
SYNDICATED COLUMN: 3 Big Reasons Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President
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Zero Accomplishments. Bad for Women. And She’s Dumb.
“Hillary Clinton remains the most formidable presidential nomination frontrunner for a non-incumbent in the modern era,” Harry J. Enten writes in The Guardian. It’s not just Brits. “Since leaving Foggy Bottom,” Linda Killian waxed in The Atlantic, “she has positioned herself as an icon of women’s empowerment. That makes another White House run even more important and likely.”
Shit.
Please stop the Hillary puffery. The last thing the country needs is a Hillary candidacy — much less another President Clinton.
PrezHill would be bad for America, awful for Democrats and downright deadly to progressives — especially feminists. (She may know that herself; it may explain her reluctance to prepare for a 2016 run.)
Here, in an easy clip-and-take-to-the-primaries nutshell, is the non-vast-rightie-conspiracy case against Hillary:
1. Zero record of accomplishment.
Since 2009 we’ve seen what happens when we elect a president with charisma but minus a resume: weakness, waffling, national decline. Obama’s signature/single accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, embodies design-by-committee conception and autopilot execution.
Hillary’s admirers have conflated her impressive list of jobs with actually having gotten things done. When you scratch the surface, however, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the woman has done little more than warm a series of comfy leather desk chairs. How has this career politician changed Americans’ lives? Not in the least.
No doubt, Hillary knows her way around the corridors of power: First Lady, Senator from New York, presidential candidate, Secretary of State. Nice resume, but what did she do with all her jobs? Not much.
First Lady Ladybird Johnson led a highway beautification campaign that literally changed America’s landscape for the better. Betty Ford courageously exposed herself as an alcoholic, serving as a role model by publicly seeking treatment. In terms of achievement, Hillary Clinton’s political life peaked in 1993 with “HillaryCare,” a botched attempt at healthcare reform that failed because no one, including liberals, agreed with the core mission of what liberal Democratic Senator Robert Byrd called “a very complex, very expensive, very little understood piece of legislation”: federal subsidies for wildly profitable private insurance corporations (sound familiar?).
After sleazing her way into the Capitol as an out-of-state carpetbagger — New Yorkers still remember — Senator Clinton wiled away the early 2000s as a slacker Senator. This, remember, was while Bush was pushing through his radical right agenda: the Patriot Act, wars, coups, drones, torture, renditions and so on.
While Bush was running roughshod, Hillary was meek and acquiescent.
Clinton’s legislative proposals were trivial and few. Her bargaining skills were so lousy that she couldn’t find cosponsors for her tiny-bore bills — even fellow Democrats snubbed the former First Lady on stuff like increasing bennies for members of the Coast Guard. “Senator Clinton is right when she claims to be the experienced candidate,” Adam Hamft wrote for HuffPo during the 2008 primaries, “although it’s not the experience she would like us to believe. It’s a track record of legislative failure and futility.”
Hillary cheerleaders brag that she logged nearly a million miles of air travel as Secretary of State. “She reminded the world that Woody Allen was right even when it comes to diplomacy: 80 percent of success really is simply showing up,” Megan Garber cheered in The Atlantic (what is it about that rag and Hillary?).
What success?
The best case I could find for Hillary as kickass StateSec comes courtesy of PolicyMic, which I hope is on her payroll given how much they suck up to her. An article titled “5 Top Highlights in Hillary Clinton’s Secretary of State Tenure” cites “People-to-People Diplomacy” (all that travel), “The Importance of Economics” (“helping U.S. companies win business overseas”), “Restoring American Credibility” (“outreach to [the military junta in] Burma,” “brokering a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel,” and “coordination with Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi will likely give the U.S. greater leverage to pursue a robust peace process in 2013″ — but “likely” didn’t pan out…why doesn’t Mo return my calls anymore?).
“Rock star diplomat,” as The New York Times Magazine called her? Hardly.
As Stephen M. Walt notes in Foreign Policy, “she’s hardly racked up any major achievements…She played little role in extricating us from Iraq, and it is hard to see her fingerprints on the U.S. approach to Afghanistan. She has done her best to smooth the troubled relationship with Pakistan, but anti-Americanism remains endemic in that country and it hardly looks like a success story at this point…She certainly helped get tougher sanctions on Iran, but the danger of war still looms and there’s been no breakthrough there either…Needless to say, she has done nothing to advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace or even to halt Israel’s increasingly naked land grab there.” (Talks with Iran began after Clinton quit.)
Yeah, she’s been busy. But she has little to show for her time in office — she works dumb, not smart. At least with Obama, 2008 voters saw potential. Hillary has had 20 years to shine. If she hasn’t gotten anything accomplished in all that time, with all that power, why should we think she’ll make a great president?
2. She’s a terrible role model for women.
A woman president is two centuries overdue. It’s embarrassing that we’re behind such forward-looking nations as Pakistan in this respect. But our first female leader should not be Hillary Clinton.
I’m not rehashing the oft-stated argument that she should have divorced Bill post-Monica: I’m 99% sure they have an open marriage and anyway, the monogamist demand that jilted spouses DTMFA because, just because, is stupid.
The real issue is that Hillary married her way into power. Sorry, Hillarites: there is nothing new here, no cracked glass ceilings. Owing everything you have to your husband is at least as old as Muriel Humphrey, who succeeded Senator Hubert after he died in 1978. In a nation with more than 150 million women, it ought to be possible to find a president who got there on her own merits.
Remember, it’s not like Hillary did much with the remarkable opportunities she was given.
3. She’s kind of dumb.
In 2003, Senator Clinton cast the most important vote of her life, in favor of invading Iraq. Not only was it morally unconscionable — Bush ginned up the war from thin air, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and there was neither evidence nor proof that Saddam had WMDs — her war authorization vote was politically idiotic.
Hillary lost the 2008 Democratic nomination to Obama (who, though voting six times for war funding, and not in the Senate in 2003, had criticized that “dumb war”) due to that vote.
Though Clinton has never apologized for pandering to post-9/11 yellow-ribbons-all-over-the-car militarism (which is also stupid), her lame excuses in 2008 (she claimed she “thought it was a vote to put inspectors back in” even though it was called the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002”) indicate that she knew she’d blown it.
Also, the fact that she thought anyone would buy such ridiculous lies further indicates less than awesome intelligence.
Let’s give Hillary the benefit of the doubt: we’ll assume she wasn’t so breathtakingly stupid as to think invading Iraq was moral or legal. Even so, her pandering betrays poor political calculus.
It should have been obvious — it was to me — that the U.S. would lose in Iraq. Given Clinton’s options at the time (run for president a year later in 2004, reelection in 2006, or 2008), she was an idiot to think that her vote to authorize what would soon turn into an unpopular war wouldn’t decimate her support among the Democratic party’s liberal antiwar base.
Having a cynical political operator as president is bad. But I’ll take a smart cynic over a dumb panderer.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. Go there to join the Ted Rall Subscription Service and receive all of Ted’s cartoons and columns by email.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
