A totally biased and unreasonable list of blogs that I think you might enjoy reading.
You can tell a lot about a candidate by how he or she runs a campaign, not everything you need to know, of course. Positions, experience, judgment, do matter. But it is worth noting that if a campaign is a train-wreck for Democrats and the nation, then, Houston, we have a problem.
It’s common among Clinton backers in the blogosphere to suggest that, by her take-no-prisoners tactics, Hillary Clinton shows how “tough” she is, that she’s a “fighter.” Ditto for her campaign talking heads, including but not limited to: Bill Clinton, Howard Wolfson, James Carville, and Sydney Blumenthal. But here’s what’s wrong with that:
First, enough with the war (and boxing) metaphors! ”It’s a fight!” ”It’s Rocky!” It’s rough and tumble. To the extent that that’s true, we demean this process.
Need help? Hillary will “fight” for you. She’ll knock down a shot of whiskey, run up the famous (real-world movie set) in Philly, and then pummel Obama’s character. I don’t think this is what “fighting for you” means. Helping you and me is voting for the right thing at the right time. Helping you and me means being tenacious when health care reformed failed 15 years ago, not giving up for all these years. It’s not suddenly, after all that time, expecting that her health care credentials (what she “learned”) matter.
Many of you saw the Democratic campaign and costumed alter-ego characters slug it out wrestling-style on television. That parody lampooned the entire premise that we ought to go there.
Second, in hopes that you’ll mistake all manner of personal trivia, gossip and innuendo as signs of leadership or lack thereof, the HRC campaign employs the leadership=character myth. You see, that justifies all manner of sludge and false accusations: Obama isn’t “fully vetted,” his patriotism is “suspect,” he might have known someone unsavory when he was 17, he worked on a charitable board with someone.
Then Hillary’s eyebrow goes up when she talks to a news show anchor. She says snidely that Obama “says” he’s not a Muslim. And you have to wonder just who is stretching the notion of what it means to be an American here. (I don’t need to tell anyone reading this that he is not a Muslim. But that is beside the point. If he were, however, that wouldn’t remove him from eligibility either. We do have freedom of religion the last time I checked. But this is a “straw man,” a distraction.)
Here are just a few slightly edited thoughts about this from a reply I posted (under a different screen name) at Democratic Underground:
The examples of Hillary’s “character” touted here include she’s “tough,” a “fighter,” etc. You could just as easily have introduced some of the other supposed qualities which tend to (but don’t necessarily) correlate with leadership. But they do not really tell the story. That’s why leadership isn’t about traits much at all. It’s about the interaction of leaders with their followers to accomplish something. At minimum, it’s about transactions: What will this leader accomplish for us? Hopefully, it’s also about the transformation they build, a transformation bigger than the sum of the parts. (Now Michael Gerson, a Bush speech writer,is trying to make bringing transformation a bad thing. It’s elitism, he says. And therefore, talking about bringing transformation insults us because it’s condescension! Unbelievable! He sounds just like Hillary.)Using “character” as the be-all of our campaign decisions enables the media to supply us with gossipy, tidbits to wear away at the fabric of a whole person. Also, it’s so much more complex a subject that the reduction-to-absurdity in the media. For example, there tends to be optimal levels of traits, which work efficaciously. So, it means little to say, for example, that a leader should be “decisive.” Though there are some approximate correlates, traits like decisiveness, flexibility and extroversion, there can be too much of them (or too little). A too-flexible leader, would be unfocused. A too-decisive leader would be–well, like we have now, a stubborn, recalcitrant George W. Bush. And, though not on the same plane as Bush for “decisiveness excesses,” Hillary Rodham Clinton cannot admit she was wrong about her Iraq vote.
However, such traits are not literally requirements for leadership. Introverts can learn to compensate. And BTW, a “fighter” can go too far. A leader can so so “strong” that she issues pronouncements rather than leads or alienates a sizable portion of the party. She can talk in belligerent terms so as to look tough, and by doing so may fan another war or endanger our country. There just is no magic bullet. How “tough” is enough? How “tough” is too much? Will she go too far because she wants to look tough? We know John McCain might. What about Hillary, who is increasingly sounding like him regarding Iran.
But the real problem here is that being a “fighter” misses the point in leadership. Leadership is bringing together Americans toward accomplishing their common goals. And so leadership really hinges upon coalitions and consensus. How do you bring us together when she openly mocks Obama supporters (as she did when she laughingly talked about the “heavens opening up” or insults Obama by reducing him to “just a speech.”)? How do you build consensus when only she knows best and not those Obama supporters with their heads supposedly in the clouds?
Third, it is not merely feisty to employ a cadre of hit-men (and women), who seek to character assassinate day after day. It should go without saying that any man or woman running for president loves his or her country. It should never be questioned. Never. That it is is the height, or depth, of indecency and McCarthyism. I wonder what kind of “character” using McCarthy-like tactics suggests?
Don’t think they are using such tactics? Read the Salon.com article addressing the daily onslaught of emails from high-level Clinton backers disparaging Obama’s character here.
Here’s what Peter Drier has to say:
Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama’s character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they aren’t being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers — including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers — in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists. One of the recipients of the Blumenthal email blast, himself a Clinton supporter, forwards the material to me and perhaps to others.
It’s instructive to read the entire article to see how HRC is using the same “vast right wing conspiracy” to feed her propaganda through the system and they now serve as her echo chamber. How times have changed!
Here’s William Rivers Pitt’s reaction to the Blumenthal scandal.
Fourth, the fight metaphor is a really cunning way to try to make Hillary’s negatives into positives. Sure, she’s negative, but “she hast to be.” She’s doing it “for you,” don’t you know. She’s doing it to protect us from Obama! Perhaps we need protection instead from the Second Coming of Clinton.
Before you note that all candidates tend to use this language, I hasten to add, you are right to a point. But it is far, far less a style of the Obama campaign. Obama has, for example, tried to unpack the myth that the Iraq war was or is about freedom, protecting us, or making us more safe.
The Clinton campaign has brought such metaphors to a new and terrible level. Language like “obliterate” would normally not be used unless one wants to show herself even more belligerent than the Beach-Boy-Song-Singing (”Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran) McCain. Is this what she’s willing to do to get “traction.” And if so, what does it say about where we are? If Hillary keeps it up, will there yet be shoe pounding at the UN again (this time by a US president)?
The bottom line is that the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign is filled with those who show more and more that they do not understand leadership at all. It’s about them, after all, and restoration. It’s not about coalitions and consensus at all. We need to send those with this kind of unenlightened, divisive thinking packing. As I have said before, it is so last Century!
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