Why Progressives Have Every Right To Question Hillary Clinton

Hillary_is_ready_for_HillaryA lot of liberals I know are privately not all that sure if they are “Ready for Hillary,” as the Clinton boosters put it.

How can a good progressive not want to elect the first woman to the White House? If we’re not “ready,” that must mean we are sexist, right?

Hillary Clinton is running for President, not just precedent. Progressives have to make sure she truly is the best person to promote the progressive agenda over the next eight years.

This progressive has questions, and I’m not apologizing for them. Here are a few:

Is Hillary progressives’ best messenger? John Kerry.  Al Gore.  Michael Dukakis. They are all fine people, brilliant policy minds, and relatively unpersuasive on the stump. Consequently, progressives lost with them.  The 2008 vintage Hillary Clinton fell into the same category for me – relatively robotic, condescending and insincere in tone.

After President Obama, progressives are spoiled on this front. During the last two presidential elections and debates over the stimulus, health care reform and other issues, Democrats have re-learned what we learned during Bill Clinton’s time in the White House — what a huge advantage it is to have a talented Persuader-In-Chief.

Having this concern doesn’t mean I’m a misogynist. It means I want progressives to win arguments. After watching Hillary Clinton on stage for a long time, I’m not at all convinced she possess that talent.

Is Hillary a hair-triggered neocon?   In the wake of President Obama finally cleaning up George W. Bush’s messes in Iraq and Afghanistan, liberals are understandably wary of more catastrophic preemptive wars promoted by neocons.  Therefore, it should give progressives pause that neocon Robert Kagan reportedly advises Ms. Clinton on foreign policy and military issues, and considers her a kindred spirit. Here is what Kagan told the New York Times.

“If she pursues a policy, which we think she will pursue,” he added, “it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that…”

Because of disturbing reports like this, and because Hillary voted to authorize the disastrous Iraq War, progressives have every right to question her very carefully before blindly endorsing her.

Will Hillary Take On Wall Street? As a U.S. Senator from New York, Hillary has built very close ties on Wall Street. She is no Elizabeth Warren in either tone or substance. Politico recently reported what corporate types who know Hillary well have concluded about her:

Two dozen interviews about the 2016 race with unaligned GOP donors, financial executives and their Washington lobbyists turned up a consistent — and unusual — consolation candidate if Bush demurs, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie doesn’t recover politically and no other establishment favorite gets nominated: Hillary Clinton.

The darkest secret in the big money world of the Republican coastal elite is that the most palatable alternative to a nominee such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky would be Clinton, a familiar face on Wall Street following her tenure as a New York senator with relatively moderate views on taxation and financial regulation.

At a time when the country has the most income inequality it has had since 1928, I’m just not too thrilled with the idea of electing the corporate lobbyists’ favorite Democrat.

An unpersuasive communicator?  A darling of the hair triggered neocons?  The Wall Street lobbyists’ favorite Democrat?  No, progressives should not automatically pronounce themselves “ready” for that kind of leader.  These are not small issues for progressives. The rumpled septuagenarian socialist Bernie Sanders is hardly an electric personality, but he is getting an increasing amount of interest from progressives, because of these types of concerns about the front-runner.

To earn the right to win the Democratic presidential election, Hillary Clinton needs to prove to progressives that she has improved as a communicator since the 2008 race, explain in detail what kinds of military actions she would and wouldn’t support, and lay out a detailed plan for reigning in corporate abuses and reducing income inequality.

If Hillary Clinton doesn’t do those things in the coming months, I will make no apologies for supporting an alternative. (Oh, and I’m also extremely ready for Senator Elizabeth Warren, if she changes her mind in coming months.)  At the same time, if Hillary does those things, I then would be ready for her to be my party’s nominee for President, and precedent.

Note:  This post was featured in MinnPost’s Blog Cabin.

Williams or Stewart? Pick the credible journalist.

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterThere’s at least one powerful irony in NBC slamming Brian Williams with a six-month, unpaid suspension and Jon Stewart announcing his retirement from “The Daily Show” on the same day. And it’s within this question: Which of the two has proven to be the more credible messenger of news? After that you can kick around, “Which is more the caricature of a modern TV news anchor?”

There’s almost nothing more than anyone can say about Williams’ death spiral other than it was whiplash fast and unambiguous. One day he was a celebrity god. The next he’s persona non grata among the chattering classes. But in the brief time it took him to dive from the stratosphere to the asphalt, precious few bloviators and pundits dared place his personal apocalypse in the context it thoroughly and fairly requires.

Quite ironically, Stewart himself got there Monday night. Elsewhere, veteran reporter/writer John Hockenberry, squeezed it in at the end of his column on Williams’ meltdown. I was a bit disappointed that my old pal, David Carr, while eloquent, couldn’t find space to make the same salient point. (Off the radar, another old pal, Jim Leinfelder was on to this question — via e-mail –within hours of Williams’ meltdown.)

“The point” is of course this: If a guy who is basically a network entertainer — someone whose combination of good-looks, charm and polished demeanor reliably attracts an audience large enough to satisfy advertisers — is to suffer the 21st century of a public drawing-and-quartering for over-inflating his war experiences, specifically those in our Iraq invasion, how is it that both the architects of that invasion and Williams’ peers feel no heat? No widespread vilification? Much less legal recourse? Fundamentally no censure or punishment at all for leading us into a multi-trillion-dollar, reputation-blotting blunder and, in the context of the media, playing complicit lapdogs to the whole shameful affair?

Are Williams’ cocktail party-style exaggerations truly worse than the timidity of the vast majority of the national press? Worse than the professional skeptics who stood by, too intimidated by national hysteria to ask impertinent questions, as Dick Cheney and George W*. sold a war of choice based on stovepiped intelligence and fear? It certainly seems so, because Williams’ career is a cinder, while the rest, including the revered Tom Brokaw, are still welcome guests at think-y festivals, graduation ceremonies and Big League journalism award ceremony stroke-a-thons.

Watching Stewart walk us through this Monday night, the most sickening part for me, wasn’t Williams, it was the montage of people like former New York Times editor Bill Keller and his laurel-covered ilk uttering flagrantly false assurances of having done due diligence on the war at its outset. That is the sort of thing, a transparent falsehood, that ought to ruin a career, not something as minor on the grand scale of things as bragging about getting “shot out of the sky.”

Back to the question of credibility. If we truly mean “being trusted and believed in”, is Jon Stewart further down the ladder of trustworthiness than any of the correspondents who, dare I say, “questioned” George W* about the looming invasion on March 6, 2003? (Here’s video.) The record pretty clearly shows that only ABC’s Terry Moran came close to applying any heat to the veracity of the claims Cheney and Bush had been making. Everyone else was caught up in the fog of research-tested patriotism. You have to wonder how someone who hadn’t completely bought in to the group-think of corporate journalism might have approached Bush at that critical moment?

Stewart’s “fake anchor” shtick has made TV history by making “real journalists” squirm over their pettiness, ineptitude, bluster and lack of respect for the truth, all of which is course is baked into the notion of a commercially palatable news product.

So as both Williams and Stewart depart the stage, it is fair to ask, “Which of the two is more credible?” “Which is most respectful of the truth?”