Please Don’t Run, Hillary

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Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby conniption » Mon Feb 17, 2014 8:09 am

Bad Attitudes

February 16, 2014

Please Don’t Run, Hillary

I dread the coming Hillary Clinton presidency. Just what we need, another corporate sell-out “centrist” Democrat. Pinch me, I must be dreaming. I find the prospect about as alluring as discussing term life or looking at someone’s stamp collection. I’ve always thought her supporters overrate her popularity with the American people. If the Republicans weren’t as grotesque as syphilis I’m not so sure she could win. If Jeb Bush runs she loses. And doesn’t that sound like a swell race? Bush v. Clinton? Pass the morphine please.

But wait, Jeb can’t win! No sane person wants another Bush in the White House, right? Wrong. This is Amurrica, baby. We are a nation of infantilized ignoramuses. Give us our flatscreens, iPhones, cheese-filled pizza crusts and a tub full of buffalo wings and you can do what ever you want with us. Vidal was dead right when he labelled us “The United States of Amnesia.” George W. Bush is already fading from memory, and Poppy may as well have fought in the Thirty Years War for all most people know. The establishment would throw all their money, weight and power into Jeb’s candidacy. After Oprah and The View work their dark magic and show his warm and fuzzy side — He’s nice to Hispanics, don’t you know? — the fix will be in. Mr. and Mrs. America will obediently accept whatever they are given.

In other words, the game is rigged, but you already knew that. But there’s also a certain symmetry to it. There has to be a third Bush. It is written. It’s like stopping the world wars at two: It creates this nagging sense of incompleteness that cries out for some final consummation. There simply must be a third to complete the cycle.

There is nothing to be hopeful about in a Clinton presidency. Nothing fundamental will change. The establishment can sleep tight. Goldman Sachs will still own the country and we’ll still have lots and lots of bombings and wars. Hillary will say all the most wonderfully progressive things on trivial social issues that don’t pose a politico risk (like another president I know). Big oil will be just as big. Construction on the Keystone XL Pipeline will be well under way. The ten people in West Virginia who aren’t yet poisoned will be. It will be business as usual in the oligopoly.

Her supporters will become grating and blame all criticism of her as being sexist. Just wait for it. It’s an M.O. There is a strong possibility that such unappetizing figures as Robert Rubin will reenter our lives. Wouldn’t that be lovely? Egads, the horror, the horror (although I would warmly welcome Robert Reich and Jocelyn Elders back into the fold). Expect stale and cheesy campaign gimmicks. Remember the Conversation and the Kitchen Sink Campaign? May as well get a bucket now.

I fear that Hillary’s campaign will just have this sort of dull, unimaginative, back to the nineties vibe. It will be just as annoying as Republican eighties worship. We’ll be confronted with the spectacle of both major political parties having nothing to run on but nostalgia.

Now, I miss the nineties as much as the next guy. The late nineties were my glorious salad years. Colors were brighter. Love was more intense. Hangovers only lasted one day. The world was young with me and all that, you know. But they are never coming back, and in retrospect they might not have been all that hot in the first place. A lot of the cancer that is now killing us took root then, and our boy Bill had a big hand in it.

So goodbye to the nineties. They were a brief, blessed Indian summer that preceded a dark age from which we still haven’t emerged. They are like 1929 or July 1914, the last rays of Autumn sun before the longest and bleakest winter of our lives. Good times, to be sure, but there were serpents coiled in the basement.

So why am I talking about this? Pure spleen. Nothing more. But what got me started was stumbling upon one of the most dreadful headlines I’ve ever seen. No, I don’t mean “Is Oprah Gay?” or “Bob Costas Will Return To The Anchor Desk Monday” though they do be dreadful. I mean this: “Where is Monica Lewinsky Now?”

Until today, it had been several years since I heard that name, which for me was just peachy. I daresay I had forgotten all about that person. Nothing against her, but her name just conjures so many unpleasant associations — Henry Hyde, Bob Livingston, the birth of Fox News and Drudge. Who was her confederate? Linda Tripp? Sigh. What did Marx say, history repeats itself the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce? That headline brought it all vividly back to life. And then I realized what we’re going to be in for should Hillary run. Drudge is already dusting off all the old Clinton sex stuff. The right wing noise machine is going to be insufferable. Why, oh Lord, must you punish us so? My spirit sank. I haven’t felt that desolate since the day I learned the Millard Fillmore Appreciation Society had disbanded. For the love of all that is holy, Mrs. Clinton, please don’t run. Spare your nation the trauma. Let Joe Biden do it. Let Elizabeth Warren do it!

Posted by OHollern at February 16, 2014 06:09 PM
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby NeonLX » Tue Feb 18, 2014 6:39 pm

Hahaha. That's pretty funny.

I think it would be cool if Biden ran. Wonder how long it would be until he stroked out? The dude is wound real tight.

I used to listen to "liberal" talk on the radio at night when I was doing dishes. It was comprised of a few glowing embers left over from when Air America went kerblooey (Thom Hartmann and that buttmunch Alan Colmes; can't remember anyone else). I don't do that anymore. It's friggin' pointless. All the blue dog talking points repeatedly catapulted at the listener. Thom Hartmann occasionally nibbles around the edges of meatier problems, but even that wasn't enough to retain me. I mean it is, after all, still corporate radio, brought to you by Clear Channel.
America is a fucked society because there is no room for essential human dignity. Its all about what you have, not who you are.--Joe Hillshoist
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby 82_28 » Tue Feb 18, 2014 8:26 pm

I think nobody should run. A total boycott. Smoke out the fuckers who think this shit even exists in reality and only own up to the virtualism of what it's always been. What would it mean to have a total boycott of the "race" itself, something even more would take its place? It would be completely virtualized and for once we would know it was because we accept the virtuality as something that exists and isn't a fantasy.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby 8bitagent » Tue Feb 18, 2014 10:36 pm

But wait, Jeb can’t win! No sane person wants another Bush in the White House, right? Wrong. This is Amurrica, baby. We are a nation of infantilized ignoramuses. Give us our flatscreens, iPhones, cheese-filled pizza crusts and a tub full of buffalo wings and you can do what ever you want with us. Vidal was dead right when he labelled us “The United States of Amnesia.” George W. Bush is already fading from memory, and Poppy may as well have fought in the Thirty Years War for all most people know. The establishment would throw all their money, weight and power into Jeb’s candidacy. After Oprah and The View work their dark magic and show his warm and fuzzy side — He’s nice to Hispanics, don’t you know? — the fix will be in. Mr. and Mrs. America will obediently accept whatever they are given.


BING FUCKING GO

I'm still surprised why Karl Rove genuinely thought and tried to convince so many "constituents" that Romneyzoid had it in the bag.
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby Nordic » Wed Feb 19, 2014 2:30 am

Right. Let's blame the people. It's their fault the bad guys have taken over.

How bout we blame the bad guys? For once.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby conniption » Sun Aug 17, 2014 6:24 pm

Dissident Voice

Hillary-The-Hawk Flies Again

By Ralph Nader
16 August 2014


“Hillary works for Goldman Sachs and likes war, otherwise I like Hillary,” a former Bill Clinton aide told me sardonically. First, he was referring to her cushy relationships with top Wall Street barons and her $200,000 speeches with the criminal enterprise known as Goldman Sachs, which played a part in crashing the U.S. economy in 2008 and burdening taxpayers with costly bailouts. Second, he was calling attention to her war hawkish foreign policy.

Last week, Hillary-The-Hawk emerged, once again, with comments to The Atlantic attacking Obama for being weak and not having an organized foreign policy. She was calling Obama weak despite his heavy hand in droning, bombing and intervening during his Presidency. While Obama is often wrong, he is hardly a pacifist commander. It’s a small wonder that since 2008, Hillary-The-Hawk has been generally described as, in the words of the New York Times journalist Mark Landler, “more hawkish than Mr. Obama.”

In The Atlantic interview, she chided Obama for not more deeply involving the U.S. with the rebels in Syria, who themselves are riven into factions and deprived of strong leaders and, with few exceptions, trained fighters. As Mrs. Clinton well knows, from her time as Secretary of State, the White House was being cautious because of growing Congressional opposition to intervention in Syria as Congress sought to determine the best rebel groups to arm and how to prevent this weaponry from falling into the hands of the enemy insurgents.

She grandly told her interviewer, “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” Nonsense. Not plunging into unconstitutional wars could have been a fine “organizing principle.” Instead, she voted for the criminal invasion of Iraq, which boomeranged back into costly chaos and tragedy for the Iraqi people and the American taxpayers.

Moreover, the former Secretary of State ended her undistinguished tenure in 2013 with an unremitting record of militarizing a Department that was originally chartered over 200 years ago to be the expression of American diplomacy. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton made far more bellicose statements than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates did. Some career Foreign Service Officers found her aggressive language unhelpful, if not downright hazardous to their diplomatic missions.

Such belligerency translated into her pushing both opposed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and reluctant President Obama to topple the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. The Libyan dictator had given up his dangerous weapons and was re-establishing relations with Western countries and Western oil companies. Mrs. Clinton had no “organizing principle” for the deadly aftermath with warring militias carving up Libya and spilling over into Mali and the resultant, violent disruption in Central Africa. The Libyan assault was Hillary Clinton’s undeclared war – a continuing disaster that shows her touted foreign policy experience as just doing more “stupid stuff.” She displays much ignorance about the quicksand perils for the United States of post-dictatorial vacuums in tribal, sectarian societies.

After criticizing Obama, Mrs. Clinton then issued a statement saying she had called the president to say that she did not intend to attack him and anticipated “hugging it out” with him at a Martha’s Vineyard party. Embracing opportunistically after attacking is less than admirable.

Considering Hillary Clinton’s origins as an anti-Vietnam War youth, how did she end up such a war hawk? Perhaps it is a result of her overweening political ambition and her determination to prevent accusations of being soft on militarism and its imperial Empire because she is a woman.

After her celebrity election as New York’s Senator in 2000, she was given a requested seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. There, unlike her war-like friend, Republican Senator John McCain, she rarely challenged a boondoggle Pentagon contract; never took on the defense industry’s waste, fraud and abuse; and never saw a redundant or unneeded weapons system (often criticized by retired Generals and Admirals) that she did not like.

The vaunted military-industrial complex, which President Eisenhower warned about, got the message. Hillary Clinton was one of them.

Energetically waging peace was not on Secretary of State Clinton’s agenda. She would rather talk about military might and deployment in one geographic area after another. At the U.S. Naval Academy in 2012, Generalissma Clinton gave a speech about pivoting to East Asia with “force posture” otherwise known as “force projection” (one of her favorite phrases) of U.S. naval ships, planes and positioned troops in countries neighboring China.

Of course, China’s response was to increase its military budget and project its own military might. The world’s super-power should not be addicted to continuous provocations that produce unintended consequences.

As she goes around the country, with an expanded publicly-funded Secret Service corps to promote the private sales of her book, Hard Choices, Hillary Clinton needs to ponder what, if anything, she as a Presidential candidate has to offer a war-weary, corporate-dominated American people. As a former member of the board of directors of Walmart, Hillary Clinton waited several years before coming out this April in support for a restored minimum wage for thirty million American workers (a majority of whom are women).

This delay is not surprising considering Hillary Clinton spends her time in the splendors of the wealthy classes and the Wall Street crowd, when she isn’t pulling down huge speech fees pandering to giant trade association conventions. This creates distance between her and the hard-pressed experiences of the masses, doesn’t it?

See Progressives Opposed to a Clinton Dynasty for more information.

Ralph Nader is a leading consumer advocate, the author of Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State(2014), among many other books, and a four-time candidate for US President. Read other articles by Ralph, or visit Ralph’s website.
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby justdrew » Sun Aug 17, 2014 9:28 pm

what if they held an election, and nobody ran?
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby freemason9 » Sun Aug 17, 2014 9:41 pm

elections, LOL
The real issue is that there is extremely low likelihood that the speculations of the untrained, on a topic almost pathologically riddled by dynamic considerations and feedback effects, will offer anything new.
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sun Aug 17, 2014 10:09 pm



Indeed.

"Elections" should be in quotes at all times.

Hillary running or not running is moot.

Agendas shall proceed regardless of stooge.
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby Nordic » Mon Aug 18, 2014 8:29 pm

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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby BOOGIE66 » Tue Aug 19, 2014 2:20 am

Nordic » Tue Feb 18, 2014 10:30 pm wrote:Right. Let's blame the people. It's their fault the bad guys have taken over.

How bout we blame the bad guys? For once.



If you keep supporting the system by voting etc you're a "bad guy"
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby 8bitagent » Tue Aug 19, 2014 4:52 am

I swear anyone who supports either Hillary or whatever tea party fucktard foistered upon us in 2016 is part of the problem. Maybe we'll have a revolution in the streets before the vomit election cycle
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby 8bitagent » Thu Aug 21, 2014 12:23 am

Once again, Russel Brand is dead on in this new interview short clip with Cenk of the Young Turks. He's not saying Obama is a bad guy at heart, but that he's part of a system that would never
allow a truly progressive or forward thinking individual.
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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby conniption » Fri Nov 28, 2014 7:05 am

The Politics Blog

The 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


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Mark Peterson/Redux

Published in the November 2014 issue

It 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.)

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O'Malley: The only one talking like he might not let Hillary skate. Erika Larsen/Redux

Which 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?

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Biden: Watching Hillary and waiting.
Mark Peterson/Redux

Given 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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Re: Please Don’t Run, Hillary

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Nov 28, 2014 12:15 pm

BOOGIE66 » Tue Aug 19, 2014 2:20 am wrote:
Nordic » Tue Feb 18, 2014 10:30 pm wrote:Right. Let's blame the people. It's their fault the bad guys have taken over.

How bout we blame the bad guys? For once.



If you keep supporting the system by voting etc you're a "bad guy"


I understand your point, BOOGIE, but strongly disagree with the truthfulness of it. A showing of dissent can clearly become more than a discussion point.

Take for example, NY's Green Party candidate for Governor, Howie Hawkins and the result of his turnout of support this last election. I voted for him. I know the man and like his politics, but it was the first time I cast a ballot for him, although he's run before. I felt comfortable casting such a protest vote, though I knew my vote would not help him become elected. I voted against electing Cuomo, though I knew it was likely he would win. I voted against his philosophy and my vote had demonstrable positive effect.

My vote helped the Green Party, which appeared 4th of the third party candidates listed after Dems and Repubs, displace the the 3rd listed third party candidate for the Working Family Party, moving them down in position on the ballot. Next election the Green Party will appear before Working Family on the ballot.

I'm sure you feel this insignificant, but I assure you it is not. Working Family Party leadership endorsed Cuomo; not something its membership opposed.

But more importantly, it is a shift away from not only both D & R (DNR?), but also sends a message to progressive third parties: "Listen to your members and do their bidding." Perhaps too slow a revolution for some.

Biden won't run. Jeb is too frightful to think about. Hillary too. It will be bizarre, no matter who's running. Elizabeth Warren is my choice, but I doubt she'd enter the race unless some undiscovered scandal Hillary's been involved in blows her candidacy.
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