Alex Pareene suggests the one thing we most need to know about a potential Hilary Clinton candidacy:
The question for someone considering whether or not to support Clinton in 2016 is, will a Clinton 2016 campaign pass the Mark Penn Test? The Mark Penn Test, which I just invented, determines whether or not a person should be trusted with the presidency, based solely on one criterion: Whether or not they pay Mark Penn to do anything for their campaign. Paying Mark Penn means you’ve failed the Mark Penn Test.
I really hope Clinton runs for President in 2016. She’s not a progressive, but I don’t know of any progressive who can win the primary in the current Democratic Party. (Although I really hope that Oregon’s Ron Wyden has presidential ambitions). I don’t think it much matters which centrist Democrat capable of winning the primary is in the White House; given institutional limitations on the President, any Democrat elected to the White House will pursue broadly similar policies.
Furthermore, it seems likely that Clinton will be the only viable female candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2012. And I really, really want there to be a female President. The all-male slate of American Presidents is, as far as I’m concerned, a blight on our history and on our national honor.
However, the most important task of any Democratic primary winner is to beat the GOP nominee in the presidential election. If you can’t get elected, then everything else you believe in becomes irrelevant. And although Clinton was very successful as Secretary of State, she doesn’t seem to be very good at running a presidential campaign.
In particular, Clinton didn’t appreciate how much proportional representation matters in a Democratic primary. Worst, the people she hired to understand this stuff, she didn’t listen to. Instead, she allowed Mark Penn – who seemingly refused to believe that you can win lots of big states and still lose the delegate campaign – to dictate her campaign’s strategy until it was too late to recover.
Morale was at a low ebb in the Clinton campaign by early March. Incredibly, the campaign had been caught by surprise by Obama’s tortoise-and-hare strategy. While Hillary won some big states on Super Tuesday, including New York, California, New Jersey and—take that, Ted Kennedy!—Massachusetts, Obama had been racking up delegates in smaller states, particularly caucus states, where he was organized and Clinton was not. Given the way delegates were apportioned, Obama had amassed a nearly insurmountable lead by the time of the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4. At one meeting around the time of Super Tuesday, Ickes tried—for the umpteenth time, it seemed—to explain the mechanics of proportional representation. When President Clinton said, “Oh, hell, we didn’t have this stuff in 1992,” Ickes nearly “fell off his chair,” as he later put it, because the system had been essentially the same back then. Ickes grumbled to reporters that Penn didn’t even know that California wasn’t winner-take-all; Penn denied it.
I want Clinton to run, and (barring the entry of a much more progressive candidate into the race) to win. But I also want her assurance that if we vote for Hilary Clinton, we won’t see a repeat of the incompetence, public infighting, and lack of discipline that characterized her 2008 campaign.
If and when Clinton moves back into the White House, this time as President, I don’t care if she stacks her appointments with Clinton loyalists instead of Obama people – by and large, they’re all cut from the same material. But before she gets to that point, I hope Clinton puts pragmatism above pride and loyalty, and fills her staff from bottom to top with Obama campaign people. Because they, unlike Mark Penn and the other Clinton people, actually seem to be good at conducting a presidential campaign.
That said, Clinton would have a big advantage as a candidate: Her presence at the top of the ticket would galvanize some leading Republicans to say even more stupid things about women than usual, which would increase the Democrats already existing advantage among female voters.
I’m with you up until “I don’t care if she stacks her appointments with Clinton loyalists instead of Obama people – by and large, they’re all cut from the same material.” This is profoundly not true. Having competent executive appointments is a huge deal and makes the difference in “does the government work or fail to work?” I care a lot about the government apparatus working effectively and efficiently, particularly in education, disease control, diplomacy, defense, judiciary, energy, disaster response, and environment.
(this isn’t a partisan thing, either: I’d rather have a competent Republican at Energy than a hackish Democrat. b/c the job of appointees is to implement the law and the president’s agenda, the issue is “can they implement this competently” much more than “what personal beliefs do they have.”)
That said, I trust that any Hilary Clinton than can win a campaign (i.e. can pass the Mark Penn test) will also appoint vaguely competent staff. If she wins w/o the old Clinton idiots, I would hope that’s because she’s learned that they’re idiots, and thus won’t appoint them to significant executive posts.
So, she’s not a progressive, she made poor campaign decisions before, she’s got a ton of negative baggage, her appointees would take us backward, and all the Republicans would have to do is dust off and re-use all their 2008 material…
But you still want her to be President simply because she’s a woman. Welcome to sexism.
In the 2008 Illinois Primary I took a Democratic ballot – prompting a short discussion with the election judge, who, knowing me, looked at me with absolute shock when I asked for it – and voted for Hillary. But the Chicago machine was in the bag for then-Sen. Obama and so was pretty much every black person in the State of Illinois, and it’s hard to overcome racism. I still think she would have made a much better President than Obama. But she didn’t have good relations with the press, she had a somewhat abrasive personality at times and the press was just absolutely in love with the concept of Our First Black President.
I found this interesting:
Really? On what basis?
Copyleft –
Actually, what I wrote was that I hope Clinton wins “barring the entry of a much more progressive candidate into the race.”
Obviously, if there’s someone whose policies would be significantly better than Clinton’s, I’d want that person to win regardless of sex. But it’s more than likely that we’ll end up with another Clinton vs Obama choice – that is, a choice of viable candidates whose policy views are very nearly interchangeable.
In that situation, yes, I’d want the woman to win. I think that after 43 male Presidents (or 44 if you count Grover C. twice), there’s a severe imbalance that needs to at least begin to be counterbalanced. I think it would be good for little girls growing up in this country to be able to see that most prominent of all glass ceilings in the world broken.
How is that sexist, exactly? Are you saying that to ever notice that something sexist has happened (44 male presidencies in a row) and wish that it would stop is itself sexist?
For similar reasons, Ron, I don’t buy that it’s racist for Black voters to prefer Obama over Clinton. We’ve seen many times in the past that Black voters don’t automatically vote for any Black candidate (Jessie Jackson); but given a viable Black candidate running against a very similar viable white candidate, I don’t see anything racist about wanting to see a longstanding and prominent racial barrier broken.
And for the purposes of this post, let’s just say that Clinton is widely perceived among Democratic primary voters as having done a good job as SoS, and leave it that.
Ben:
I think that, unlike the Clinton campaign people, the Clinton people who worked in the executive branch during Bill Clinton’s presidency did a basically competent job running the executive. So even if Hillary wins the presidency and stocks the White House with a lot of folks who worked in the previous Clinton administration, I wouldn’t expect them to be any worse than the Obama folks. (Although I admit, this is just general impression – I don’t know about the Clinton administration folks in any detail.)
Clinton’s campaign people, on the other hand, are clearly much worse than Obama’s.
Amp, if someone votes for a given person based on their race, it’s racist.
Sigh.
RonF,
Years of participating in discussions of racism on Alas, and virtually the only activity where you are willing to assume people’s motives around race without any evidence turns out to be black people voting. I wish that were surprising.
Sighing is sexist.
Furthermore, it seems likely that Clinton will be the only viable female candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2012.
2016.
Huh. Is California not winner-take-all? I’ve voted here for 25 years and always assumed it was. I googled around a bit and found nothing saying it isn’t.
monsterzero: California is proportional in the Democratic primaries.