I made a big deal of the New York Times endorsement at the time. I thought they endorsed Ms. Clinton to hedge their bets – and that the endorsement was rather weak. Some disagreed.
But The New Republic is reporting that the Times almost didn’t endorse Ms. Clinton:
On January 25, the New York Times endorsed Senator Hillary Clinton. At the time, the 1,100-word editorial stood out for both its tepidness and early appearance, coming near the front-end of the primary season.
Jeffrey Rosen, writing in The New York Times today, compares Ms. Clinton’s commitment to civil liberties and privacy to Mr. Obama’s:
[Ms. Clinton’s] speeches about privacy suggest that she has boundless faith in the power of experts, judges and ultimately herself to strike the correct balance between privacy and security.
Moreover, the core constituency that cares intensely about civil liberties is a distinct minority — some polls estimate it as around 20 percent of the electorate. A polarizing president, who played primarily to the Democratic base and refused to reach out to conservative libertarians, would have no hope of striking a sensible balance between privacy and security.
Mr. Obama, by contrast, is not a knee-jerk believer in the old-fashioned liberal view that courts should unilaterally impose civil liberties protections on unwilling majorities. His formative experiences have involved arguing for civil liberties in the legislatures rather than courts, and winning over skeptics on both sides of the political spectrum, as he won over the police and prosecutors in Chicago.
From the Associated Press:
“What’s lost by embracing a tyrant who puts his people in prison because of their political beliefs?” Bush asked rhetorically. “What’s lost is it’ll send the wrong message. It’ll send a discouraging message to those who wonder whether America will continue to work for the freedom of prisoners. It’ll give great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity.”
A U.S. president’s decision to talk with certain international figures can be counterproductive, Bush said.
“It can send chilling signals and messages to our allies,” he said. “It can send confusion about our foreign policy. It discourages reformers inside their own country.”
Sometimes, it is astounding how obtuse Mr. Bush can be.
The idea that Bush — who regularly hangs out with, and thus “lends the status of the office and the status of our country” to the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Russia, China, and Egypt — would ever try and take a strong, principled stand against meeting with, much less supporting, repressive autocrats…well, it’s what my grandmother would call chutzpah, and what the rest of us would call “nonsense on stilts.”
Michelle Cottle of The New Republic writes in this week’s issue about how Ms. Clinton’s think tank went for Senator Barack Obama:
Still, it’s hard not to see Hillary’s loss of the unofficial CAP primary as a microcosm of her surprisingly tenuous claim on the party establishment. Maybe it loved her in the beginning, or at least felt loyalty to her. Yet the relationship was always a bit codependent for some people’s taste, and, along the way, more and more Dems came to see it as unwholesome and costly. Obama may have been an attractive suitor. But he swept into the midst of a marriage that was probably shakier than most people realized.
From Noam Sheiber’s look at Mr. Obama’s policy team in The New Republic:
The Clintonites were moderates, but they were also ideological. They explicitly rejected the liberalism of the 1970s and ’80s. The Obamanauts are decidedly non-ideological.
It’s well worth reading the entire piece.
David Duke, founder of the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, United States Congressmen, and presidential candidate, apparently would rather Mr. Obama over the other presidential contenders:
I don’t think Obama will be any more negative for the United States than Hillary or John McCain. In fact, we probably have less preference for a European like a John McCain or a Hillary who has betrayed our interests, our heritage, our rights.
I’m suggesting a new motto for Mr. Obama: Who ever thought that David Duke and Louis Farrakhan would agree on something?
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Edit – link updated after a warning that Google AdSense that the above link to TNR was broken.
Dan Balz’s article in yesterday’s Washington Post headlines that “Democratic Governors See McCain as Formidable.” Damn right they do.
Reading the article, it was difficult to tell to what extent each interviewee was trying to ensure that the Democratic nominee would pick them, and to what extent they seriously considered their state in doubt.
Governor Edward Rendell said that Mr. McCain was “the ideal [Republican] candidate for Pennsylvania.” Mr. Rendell went on to describe a scenario that suggested Mr. McCain was the seemingly inevitable candidate for Pennsylvania.
Governor Jennifer Granholm said that Mr. McCain was “appealing in Michigan. He does appeal to independent thinkers – at least he did in the past – and we have a lot of those in Michigan. Whoever the Democrat is, Michigan is a state where we’re going to have to work.”
Governor Ted Strickland explained that, “I think John McCain could have an appeal to a lot of Ohioans.” Perhaps Mr. Strickland didn’t need to get all dramatic about his state because it decided the last Democratic election.
And those are just the Governor who support Ms. Clinton. Mr. Obama’s supporters at the governor’s meeting seemed to focus less on the likelihood that their specific states would go to Mr. McCain.
Just something interesting to note…
In stark contrast to my post about why Senator Hillary Clinton should stay in the race, Op-Edna writes that Ms. Clinton can unite the country by dropping out now.
Op-Edna concludes:
Hillary isn’t helping herself by damming a tide that seeks to change this nation. For the good of her nation, she should stand down. And, if, in the interest of her self-centered-ness she needs another reason, let it be to protect the legacy she touts, and that of her husband, before they find themselves doomed, like Jimmy Carter, to stand for their failures and not their many successes.
But I think she’s making my point here. Ms. Clinton – who I have argued practices an especially self-centered politics – should withdraw now, or soon after March 4th, in order to preserve her legacy. But, if Ms. Clinton were to look to the best interests of her party and her ideals, she would turn herself into the villain she has been painted as and campaign against Mr. Obama with a vengeance.
Tyler Cowen in last week’s New York Times tries to encourage a realistic set of standards by which to judge the change Mr. Obama will bring:
To put it simply, the public this year will probably not vote itself into a much better or even much different economic policy. To be sure, the next president — whoever he or she may be — may well extend health care coverage to more Americans. But most of the country’s economic problems won’t be solved at the voting booth. It is already too late to stop an economic downturn. Health care costs will keep rising, no matter who becomes president or which party controls Congress. China is now a bigger carbon polluter than the United States, so don’t expect a tax or cap-and-trade rules to solve global warming, even if American measures are very stringent — and they probably won’t be, because higher home heating bills are not a vote winner. A Democratic president may propose more spending on social services, but most of the federal budget is on automatic pilot. Furthermore, even if a Republican president wanted to cut back on such mandates, the bulk of them are here to stay.
Commenting on the strengths of democracy:
Rather than being cynics, we should be realists. Democracy is reasonably good at some things: pushing scoundrels out of office, checking their worst excesses by requiring openness, and simply giving large numbers of people the feeling of having a voice. Democracy is not nearly as good at others: holding politicians accountable for their economic promises or translating the preferences of intellectuals into public policy…
And Mr. Cowen concludes with this prescription:
…spend your time studying foreign policy, where the president has more direct power, and the choice of a candidate makes a much bigger difference. Second, stop worrying and get back to work.