The Politics BlogThe Democrats' Hillary Clinton Problem
To elect a president, we probably ought to have some candidates. Candidates, after all, are choices. So where the hell are our choices? An argument against coronations, cleared fields, and conventional wisdom.By Charles P. Pierce
on October 30, 2014 View All Comments (133)Mark Peterson/Redux Published in the November 2014 issueIt is still the polo-shirt-and-blue-jeans-stage in what eventually will become the election of the forty-fifth president of the United States. It is still polo shirts and blue jeans and state fairs, and that's why Martin O'Malley, the governor of Maryland, and the former mayor of Baltimore, and perhaps the second-most-obvious Democratic candidate for president in 2016, has been working a hall at the Maryland State Fair like a friendly young county agent come to look over the crops. O'Malley has the green polo shirt with an official state logo and the blue jeans, and he's expressing great interest in what has been produced by Maryland's livestock—the shaved lamb at the buffet gets great reviews—and what has been grown in Maryland's fields. Across the wide midway, the carnival rides grind on, music and lights and the delighted screams of people who come here just for the fun of it.
Truth be told, by the standards of the great state fairs of the Midwest, Maryland's state fair is decidedly minor league. It is positively put in the shade when compared with the one they hold every year in Iowa and especially with the one they hold every four years in Iowa, in which an ungainly circus is laid atop the state fair and the locals get a good look at serious American politicians and their attempt to maintain their dignity while eating a corn dog. A year from now, if all indications are correct, the Iowa State Fair is going to be very important to Martin O'Malley, and it is very likely he will be wearing a nice suit as he confronts the corn dog of his destiny. This is what happens when you run for president. And Martin O'Malley is running, even if he says he isn't, even if he can still chill in a polo shirt and blue jeans because the power-suit portion of the campaign is still down the road.
"I'm helping everyone I possibly can in these midterms, and I'm finding that people all around the country are hungry for a conversation about where our country's going and how we get there," he says, "and how we start getting things done again as a people. As I campaign for Democratic governors across the country and have a chance to talk to people, I think they see that's the sort of effective leadership that's happening in many of their cities and many of their counties, even as the federal government appears to be having a more difficult time getting the hitch out of its get-along."
So O'Malley goes around the country, campaigning for people who are running in 2014 and therefore campaigning for himself in 2016, because the presidential campaign in this country never ends anymore. It just changes cast members, like
Law & Order, a few at a time. And the one thing that Martin O'Malley doesn't talk about is the fact that there is one undeclared candidate on the Democratic side who is reckoned to be capable of taking the oxygen from the room, the money from the campaign, and the nomination for the asking.
She has "cleared the field." That's what the smart people say. Without even announcing that she will run for president, Hillary Clinton has frozen the Democratic primary process. She has frozen the media's attention and the energies of the party's activists, and, most important of all, she has frozen the wallets of all the big donors, all of whom are waiting for her to jump to decide what they will be doing over the next two years. It is hard to say she's been unusually coy. After leaving her job as secretary of state, Clinton went on a massive book tour, and she's been a fixture on the high-end lecture circuit, her fees for which suddenly became a campaign issue, even though there isn't a campaign yet. And most significantly, she and her people have begun to distance themselves a bit from the president she once served. She arguably was critical of Barack Obama's "Don't do stupid shit" policy. And when the ISIS threat arose in the Middle East, there were a few strategically placed comments from anonymous "Clinton aides" that were critical of the president for not moving fast enough to meet that new threat. By the standards of the fall of 2014, by the same standards that we judge Martin O'Malley by, Hillary Clinton is clearly running for president. And they say she has cleared the field.
They say she has cleared the field because that's what political pros get paid to say, but they also say it as a kind of supplication to the gods of political chance, because there is one thing that people in the party try very hard not to talk about these days, something that remains unspoken for the same reason that theater people do not say Macbeth and baseball players never mention a no-hitter in progress.
What if she doesn't run?
What if, for one reason or another, she can't run?
What happens if, after spending a couple years clearing the field, Hillary Clinton walks away from it all, leaving the Democratic party with nothing more than, well, an empty field? And Martin O'Malley.
"The phenomenon of clearing the field?" he asks. "That sounds like a horse-race question, and I'm not doing horse-race questions." And outside the hall, on the other side of the wide midway, the carnival grinds on anyway, music and lights and happy laughter, already in full swing for the day.
This is what "clearing the field" looks like. This is the conventional wisdom that, in our politics today and at this point in a presidential-election cycle, is always far more conventional than it is wise. Hillary Clinton has pride of place unlike any candidate in recent memory: She's the wife of a two-term president, a former senator from New York, and the former secretary of state. She has first call on the party's most talented campaign staffers, both nationally and in the states. She has first call on the party's most overstuffed wallets and on every local- and national-television camera from Iowa to New Hampshire and back again. This has been recognized tacitly by almost every other proposed potential candidate. Vice-president Joseph Biden is curiously (and uncharacteristically) reticent. Liberal darling Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts repeatedly has declined to run and signed a letter endorsing Clinton. Everybody else—ambitious senators like New York's Kirsten Gillibrand and ambitious governors like the dark lord, Andrew Cuomo, also of New York—is sitting back and waiting and silently asking themselves that question, running it through their own silent hubris until it produces an answer.
Question: What if she doesn't run?
Answer: Why not me?
It is not cowardice if it can be sold as shrewd calculation. And it can be sold as shrewd calculation, because that is the way wisdom becomes conventional, and the more conventional it becomes, the less wise it is. After all, in the spring of 1991, President George H. W. Bush, the conqueror of the Levant, had an approval rating of 80 by-God percent. This scared away most of whom were perceived to be on the Democratic party's A-list, including Andrew Cuomo's father, from challenging him. The elder Bush had cleared both fields, they said. One of the few people who stepped up was the governor of Arkansas, who put together a renegade staff that outhustled the Republicans for two years and got the governor of Arkansas, and his sharp lawyer of a wife, elected president. Some people look at a cleared field and see a place where there is limitless room to run.
(And we should pause here for a moment and mention the other side. According to the conventional wisdom, the Republicans do not have a cleared field. Rather, they have a "deep bench." There are governors who were elected in the great wave of 2010, and there are senators from that same era. Unfortunately, at the moment, the conventional wisdom already has been rendered far more conventional than wise. Of those governors, Rick Perry of Texas is under indictment, Chris Christie of New Jersey and Scott Walker of Wisconsin are under investigation, and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is underwater in the polls in his home state. Of those senators, Marco Rubio of Florida has rendered himself maladroit in his attempt to satisfy all the elements of the Republican base, turning his back on his signature issue—immigration reform—because it is unpopular with a large portion of said base. By the end of last summer, Republicans were talking openly of reanimating the career of Jeb Bush, he of the cursed surname. Mitt Romney was leading some polls in Iowa by a huge margin. If the Democratic field is clear, then the Republican field is thick with locusts.)
O'Malley: The only one talking like he might not let Hillary skate. Erika Larsen/ReduxWhich brings us to the conventional contrarianism that, in our politics today and at this point in a presidential-election cycle, is more conventional than it is contrary. The speculation goes this way: Clinton had the same advantages in 2008 that she has today, with the exception of her subsequently having been secretary of state. She had first call on staff, on contributors, and on the spotlight. And she spent two years getting beaten to the punch and utterly wrong-footed by the renegade staff of a junior senator from Illinois that had a better handle on the prevailing zeitgeist and a far superior knowledge of the new communication technology and how best to put it to political use, and that got the senator from Illinois elected president. To make an easy historical parallel, Hillary Clinton in 2007 was William Seward in 1859, a senator from New York whose pockets were bulging with IOU's and who was a power in the party and its presumptive presidential nominee. Seward led the race all the way through two ballots at the 1860 Republican convention until he and his people got outmaneuvered by a judge named David Davis and the people working on behalf of a politician from Illinois whose speeches had galvanized the nation but whose political résumé was painfully limited to one term in Congress. Ultimately, of course, and to close the historical circle, the politician from Illinois became president and Seward served as his secretary of state.
Thus is another unspoken question added to the list:
What if she doesn't run?
What if she can't run?
What if I can beat her?
That's the question Martin O'Malley is searching the country for an answer to, even if he declines to admit that's what he's doing.
"I guess that's a question that others can answer and, ultimately, the people will answer," he says. "For my part, I believe that in Baltimore city and in the state of Maryland, we have brought forward a new and better way of governing. It's not the old way of ideology and bureaucracy and hierarchy. It's about governing for results. It's about intentional leadership that's collaborative, that's open, that's transparent, that operates by way of common platforms of action. And that's where the country's headed. It's certainly the way the country's headed. It's certainly the sort of leadership that younger people are demanding, and the sooner we get there, I think, the better for our economy and the better for all aspects of our journey as a people."
He is positioning himself here as a candidate who can run against the notion of the cleared field, who can make the very concept of the cleared field an offense against democracy—a truncation of the people's right to determine their own leaders and to make their own independent choice. It is not so much that O'Malley is an "outsider"; he's been a mayor, a governor, and a national figure among Democrats for more than a decade. Rather, it is that he is challenging placid inevitability on behalf of democratic uproar. There is possibility in that. There always has been. Because Americans, damn them, love their horse race, even if Martin O'Malley would rather not talk about it.
At the beginning, of course, none of them wanted political parties. John Adams hated them, and so did James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. So, of course, as soon as the Constitution was up and running, the first thing they all did was form political parties and start laying clubs on one another. Adams's party faded when the country decided it didn't want every president to be either a Boston lawyer or a Virginia gentleman. The one founded by Jefferson and Madison remains with us to this day. The governor of Maryland is a member of it. So is the former secretary of state. So is the incumbent president of the United States, a fact that likely would have caused both of the party's founders to have a conniption.
The history of presidential elections is the history of rebellion against the idea of the cleared field, which, in the early days, meant empowering the rough frontier against the organized power of the Eastern elites and which, as the country grew, repeatedly demanded political inclusion for the citizens of an expanding nation. Madison and Jefferson, slave-holding plantation owners both, took up the cause of the small farmer against the powdered-wig set of high Federalists. Partisans of Andrew Jackson raged so fiercely against the "corrupt bargain" struck between Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams in 1824—in which Clay threw his votes to Adams in the House of Representatives, the body deciding the election, and subsequently was appointed secretary of state—that those partisans rendered Adams's presidency a failed formality until the day, four years later, when they could install their hero in the White House. Clay cleared the field for Adams, and they both were victims of an outraged expanded democracy.
The political parties nonetheless largely were closed shops until the great Progressive movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which produced the direct election of U.S. senators and the direct primary system, regarded by Republican reformers like Robert La Follette of Wisconsin as critical to breaking up the unholy wedlock of big corporate money and all the institutions of government that had cleared the field for what had become a politico-economic puppet show. As Matthew Josephson writes in The President Makers, his brilliant study of the period: "The clamor for 'more direct democracy,' often heard from the West, the demands for stronger control of the railroads and trusts, for the curbing of the speculation in grains, for tariff reform (in the interest of the agriculturalists), for direct primaries … the cry for all that would equalize the political unbalance now rose stronger than ever, a crescendo of protest."
In 1911, when he founded the National Progressive Republican League, La Follette made direct primaries one of that organization's founding principles. There always has been a kind of instinctive underground resistance to the idea of the cleared field, a kind of autonomic reflex in a democratic republic that pushes back against an idea that's seen as being an affront to what the country fashions itself in its own mind to be, an occasional inchoate desire to break through what Josephson calls "the old superstitious limits of the parties." If we must have political parties in a democracy, history tells us, then they must constantly be made to move toward being more democratic, election by election.
That reflex still exists today, and it is surely there for Martin O'Malley, or someone else, to tap into. It was there in 2004, too, when George W. Bush, a war president by his own devising, was standing for reelection and everything hadn't gone sour on him yet, and many prominent Democrats were a bit bumfuzzled about how to square their previous support for his wars with the rising sense in the country that at least one of those wars had been sold mendaciously and that they both were being bungled away through sheer incompetence. It looked for a moment like President Bush had cleared the field. Then a governor from Vermont started going to Iowa and talking about the bloody mess the president had created.
In 1917, they opened the Hotel Ottumwa, a grand little palace on Second Street where the elite of Ottumwa, Iowa, and all of surrounding Wapello County could meet to plot and plan and conduct their business. Despite what you might assume, the primary business of the town was not related only to farming; it also involved the production of coal, a rich vein having been discovered beneath the McCready bank of Bear Creek, which ran sluggishly not too far west of the city. With coal came manufacturing of all kinds. That was what the city fathers chewed over at Canteen Lunch in the Alley at midday and, after the hotel was remodeled in the 1930s, at the Tom-Tom Tap in the Hotel Ottumwa after work. By the 1970s, though, the city was in decline. Manufacturing had fled, as it had from many of the small cities of the Midwest. The hotel closed in 1973 and remained closed for almost ten years.
(Oddly enough, this occurred just as Ottumwa was becoming famous by proxy as the hometown of Radar O'Reilly, a character on the television version of M*A*S*H, which ran on CBS during the whole time the hotel was empty. Ottumwa's most famous actual military transient was a young Navy ensign named Richard Nixon, who spent part of World War II keeping a nearby airfield safe from the Japanese.)
New management reopened the hotel in 1982. It restored the guest rooms, the restaurant, and the Tom-Tom Tap, and it made the hotel a destination again. Which is why, in the fall of 2002, when George W. Bush was on top of the world and the smart money said he had cleared the field because of his performance after the 9/11 attacks, the only actual declared candidate for president of the United States in 2004 came to Ottumwa, shook hands in the Tom-Tom Tap, and then had a meeting in one of the function rooms with his local supporters. There were five of them.
"I think I jumped in because nobody knew who the hell I was," Howard Dean says today. "There were going to be candidates who were much better known than me. I couldn't afford to wait and they could, John Kerry being one of them."
His presidential campaign ultimately came to naught, but its energy propelled Dean into the role of chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2005, a post he was elected to despite the barely sub rosa opposition of establishmentarian figures like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Dean demonstrated a distaste for the notion that any seat in the Congress should be conceded without a fight. He devised a "fifty-state strategy" that, in 2006, as the country recoiled from the disasters brought upon it by the Bush administration, helped make Pelosi the first Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives since 1994. The Democrats took six Senate seats, including improbable renegade victories like Jon Tester's in Montana and James Webb's in Virginia. They took back a majority of the country's governorships and turned state legislatures upside down. If there is one thing that has marked Dean's entire political career, it is his belief that no field in any election should ever be cleared. It was why he was in Ottumwa in 2002. It was why he insisted that the Democrats compete everywhere in 2006, resulting in the cracking open of some pockets of support in traditionally Republican areas—a boon to the Democratic president elected in 2008. The Dean campaign, with its reliance on young tech-savvy people, also provided a useful template for the campaign that got that president elected.
"The only people I hear talking about 'clearing the field,' " Dean says, "are people inside the Beltway who know nothing. I mean they're very smart, but they don't know anything. I mean I think you're going to get a primary whether you like it or not. That's always the way it's going to be, because it's the most important office in the world, and when I hear that somebody's going to get an acclamatory ride, it's just not true.
"It's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's just what's going to happen. I don't happen to think it's a bad thing to have a pre-election debate. I think it's unlikely to be a nasty one on our side. But the thing is, assuming Hillary runs—which I think is likely, but who knows?—I think she's going to be very measured about this. I think, in her own heart, she doesn't know for sure, but it looks a lot more likely now than it did last January, for example. But assuming she runs, I'm not in the 'Oh, a primary is good for us' or the 'Oh, a primary is bad for us' camp. I think the primary's a fact of life."
What Dean does not say is that primaries are also a kind of insurance against the stultification of the party's message and atrophy of its intellect, both of which can be worsened if the election actually is deemed to be over before it's even begun, before a single hand is shaken in the Tom-Tom Tap.
So what happens if she doesn't run?That's the question nobody and everybody asks. She could decline for health reasons, or because she wants to spend a couple years giving speeches and being a grandmother, or because she doesn't want to go through the whole Cirque du Clinton again, this time as the main attraction in the center ring. There already have been indications that a political culture populated by politicians and journalists and formed by the pursuit of the presidential penis from 1992 to 2000 cannot help but return to its place of origin to spawn a new generation of nonsense. As early as last January, putative Republican contender Rand Paul went on a spree, summoning up the shade of Monica Lewinsky. Paul went for a combination shot: He called the Democrats hypocrites for arguing that the Republicans were waging a "war on women" after having defended Bill Clinton's "predatory behavior" while he was in office. (Paul also suggested that Democratic politicians should return all the money Bill Clinton has raised for them. Yeah, right.) Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus defended Paul's comments, telling NBC's Andrea Mitchell "everything's on the table."
"I don't see how someone just gets a pass on anything," Priebus said last February. "I mean especially in today's politics. So I think we're going to have a truckload of opposition research on Hillary Clinton, and some things may be old and some things might be new. But I think everything is at stake when you're talking about the leader of the free world and who we're going to give the keys to run the United States of America."
This was a not entirely camouflaged two-rail shot aimed not at former president Clinton but at potential president Clinton, a subliminal argument that she should have brained the cad with a frying pan but didn't because she always has been power-hungry. See how easy it was to transport back to 1992 again?
Biden: Watching Hillary and waiting.Mark Peterson/ReduxGiven the very likely prospect of all that erupting again, perhaps even more garishly than before, owing to the accelerated technology of the media/entertainment/gossip industry over the past twenty years, what happens if she doesn't run?
"I think Andrew Cuomo might try. I think Kirsten Gillibrand would consider it," Dean says. "Amy Klobuchar will think about it. I'm sure O'Malley will be in. And I think Sanders will be in."
If you eliminate all the people who seem to be waiting for Hillary Clinton to make the call—Gillibrand first among them, because she has taken on national issues in a way that may lead you to wonder if she's not willing to make a run regardless—then there's O'Malley, piling up chits and IOU's all over the hinterlands. Maybe Jim Webb. And there's Bernie Sanders—and that may be the key to understanding the whole phenomenon of the cleared field. Sanders is an independent who caucuses with the Democratic side in the Senate. He is an unapologetic liberal, an actual Socialist at a time when the word is thrown around to mean anyone who believes in repairing roads and fighting fires. He also seems to be the one candidate, even more so than O'Malley, who has taken to heart Dean's resistance to the idea of a cleared field, who has imbibed his fellow Vermonter's disdain for the notion that there is anyplace in the country where the Democrats shouldn't compete and that there is any issue on which the Democrats should decline to engage. Sanders fought a ferocious battle in the Senate this year to provide increased benefits to veterans and their families, and he was equally ferocious in denouncing the problems with the health-care system in the Veterans Administration. In August and September, he was making this pitch, as well as inveighing against an economic system that seems increasingly rigged upwards—not in Vermont or Oregon but in South Carolina and Mississippi. And that is a response to the worst thing about accepting as axiomatic the notion of the cleared field: It strangles debate. It makes effective coalition-building beyond the mainstream impossible. Change within nothing but acceptable parameters is stillborn, and the really serious problems affecting the country get sanded over and obscured by tactics. People whose lives have been ground up over the past decade have their appeals drowned out by the hoofbeats of the horse race.
"What I'm saying," Sanders says, "is that you've got that community. Yesterday in the evening, in Raleigh, North Carolina, we spoke to over three hundred people, working people, from the AFL-CIO and other groups. Do I think those people are satisfied with what's going on in this country? Do I think that they want real change? I think they do. In Columbia, South Carolina, we had two hundred people out. We had seniors, blacks, whites—a real coalition of people—and we had a lot of them in Mississippi for the AFL-CIO.
"The bottom line is I think the Beltway mentality underestimates the frustration and the anger that people are feeling in this country with both the economic and the political status quo."
To accept the idea that Hillary Clinton has cleared the field is not merely to put the Democratic party on the razor's edge of one person's decision. It also is to give a kind of final victory to tactics over substance, to money over argument, to an easy consensus over a hard-won mandate, and ultimately, to campaigning over governing. It is an awful, sterile place for a political party to be. And that's the thing about clearing the field: Clearing the field makes it easier to cross, but there's nothing living or growing there. It bakes brown in the sun and it cracks, and the rain runs down the cracks in vain rivulets, because there's no purpose to rain that falls on an empty field. Even the crows abandon it.
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