In Perspective

Here's Hillary Clinton at the Take Back America conference this morning:

Watching it is a reminder of something that came up over dinner last night, namely that it's important to keep this primary campaign in perspective. For all that Hillary Clinton's campaign has positioned her to the right of where Barack Obama or John Edwards are, she's running on an emerging platform that's more progressive than what John Kerry (or, for that matter, Edwards) was putting on the table in 2004. For a couple of years after 9/11, the whole American political discourse swung sharply to the right ("de-arrangement" Judis & Teixeira call it; see Kilgore for more) and now things are swaying the other way.

Comments

"Clinton Booed Again by Hard Left at Progressive Conference"

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=3297741&page=1

It looks like Clinton is positioning herself quite nicely for the general election.

Posted by blah | June 20, 2007 1:26 PM

> she's running on an emerging platform that's more
> progressive than what John Kerry (or, for that
> matter, Edwards) was putting on the table in 2004.

I guess I just have a hard time with the corporatism. A "progressive" agenda would require rolling back many of the gains that large corporate entities have made in the last 30 years in the capital/labor, regulation of unchecked capitalism, and 5%/95% concentration-of-wealth spheres. Yet Ms. Clinton's record has been almost uniformly corporation-friendly with only nods to the lower 1/3 of Americans.

I seriously question whether when push comes to shove Ms. Clinton will back the $40k/year family over the $40 million/year CEOs.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | June 20, 2007 1:30 PM

Booing starts around 23:47 on video, although her supporters tried to disperse it with cheering.

Posted by Don Williams | June 20, 2007 1:30 PM

So what are the morning ledes here?

Hillary gets booed at the annual Progressive conference but she is a progressive.

Bloomberg is a "libertarian"

Bill Richardson, the only Democratic candidate with a spit's worth of real experience in executive positions, is incompetent. Because TNR says so.

We look to rnc.com to get the judgement on Barack Obama.

Sigh.

Why do I feel like a neocon black hole has wondered near and is warping the space-time continuum here at Matthew land?

Posted by Don Williams | June 20, 2007 1:42 PM

Maybe because at least three of your statements are mischaracterizations of what was written.

Posted by JP | June 20, 2007 1:55 PM

[HRC is] running on an emerging platform that's more progressive than what John Kerry (or, for that matter, Edwards) was putting on the table in 2004.

Not really true in the case of Edwards. People keep saying that, but it just isn't so. Other than vis a vis Iraq (and I realize that's a big 'other than'), Edwards fundamentals are not that different now than in '04.

BTW, if HRC is nominated I will work for her and vote for her in the General. But....god, that voice. It hurts my ears to listen to it, and it's not because I'm some kind of crypto 'sexist' or whatever.

Posted by jonnybutter | June 20, 2007 2:21 PM

BTW, if HRC is nominated I will work for her and vote for her in the General.

I won't.

Posted by Ed Marshall | June 20, 2007 2:25 PM

At least the ABC story accurately reported that she was booed for blaming the Iraqi government for the situation in Iraq, unlike the wingnuts who are trying to claim she was booed for praising the troops. What the wingers don't seem to get, though, is that it doesn't help them to demonize liberals if the context is going to be Hillary distancing herself from the left.

The actual issue of blaming the Iraqi government is one that's always upset me. Sure, they haven't brought about a political reconciliation, but I'd like to walk a mile in their shoes before I start claiming the moral high ground over them. I remember when Tom Vilsack brought out the same line on the Daily Show and it really pissed me off. He was considerably more low-key about it than Hillary, though, who bafflingly seemed to be trying to play it for an applause line.

Still, I don't have a problem at all with Hillary as the candidate. I'm consistently amazed by the liberals who believe the right wing is wrong about every single thing in existence, except for Hillary Clinton, whose core of purest evil they had nailed from day one. If that's the direction the primary voters go in, she'll be fine.

Posted by Steve | June 20, 2007 2:45 PM

Edwards fundamentals are not that different now than in '04.

They're very different. '04 Edwards had a totally different and much worse health care plan, didn't have anything like the contemporary excellent Edwards plan on climate change, he used to have this idea about creating a domestic spy agency, and even though he talked a lot about poverty in 2004 his actual policy proposals on that subject didn't really deliver the goods.

During his off years, Edwards became much more ambitious about what he wants to try to run on.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | June 20, 2007 2:47 PM

"During his off years, Edwards became much more ambitious about what he wants to try to run on."

Yup.

Posted by Petey | June 20, 2007 2:50 PM

It's disheartening to see the opposition to HRC not as a candidate who is too far to the right, which is arguable, but as a candidate who isn't much better than a GOP candidate, which is absurd. I really had thought that these seven years of the Bush administration had killed or drastically weakened the common 2000 claim that there's no difference between these parties. The people that said such were extremely critical of Gore in 2000 and claimed that a Gore win wouldn't be much different than a Bush win. Can anyone seriously believe this today? And so could anyone seriously believe something similar about HRC today?

HRC may be too far to the right for many of us but I sure as hell am going to support her as strongly as I can if she wins the nomination because the last seven years have shown us how truly loathsome the GOP really is. They need to be opposed as strongly as possible even when the chief alternative isn't that attractive in itself.

Posted by Keith M Ellis | June 20, 2007 3:37 PM

2000 was a long time ago, Keith. Those lessons have apparently been lost in the mists of time.

Like I said, the only thing the far left and the far right agree on is that the far right is 100% correct with respect to Hillary.

Posted by Steve | June 20, 2007 3:40 PM

Indeed. Even Dean, the supposedly leftist candidate back then (aside from Kucinich of course), had a fairly conventional 90's-Dem agenda on everything not the war. Basically the whole party was terrified of rocking the boat. Edwards didn't just run on different policies, he was short on policy generally compared to now. He went around giving the same "Two Americas" speech but it was difficult to tell what this actually meant in practice. Kind of like Obama and his "hope" now.

Posted by Jose Peterson | June 20, 2007 4:06 PM

This discussion is too simplistic. There is a danger that Hilary will, if elected, keep us in Iraq. For a new U.S. president to keep us occupying that country would be a moral, political, and strategic disaster. Then there is the question of whether she will be vulnerable to pressure to, say, bomb Iran. That would be something worse than a disaster...don't know what to call it. Anyway, those foreign policy issues are the big fears.

The differences on domestic policy can be worked out.

Posted by mq | June 20, 2007 4:36 PM

"Then there is the question of whether she will be vulnerable to pressure to, say, bomb Iran. That would be something worse than a disaster..."

When didn't bombing other countries become such a disaster? Was it a disaster when Clinton bombed Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Serbia etc.? It's one thing to be wary of getting stuck in sectarian wars (except if there are no national interests at stake, like in Darfur), but bombing troublesome countries is as American as apple pie. Pull yourselves together.

Posted by Fred | June 20, 2007 5:18 PM

I'm listening to the NPR coverage of the event. One of the CODEPINK (I'm not shouting they are) people is aghast that lib Hitler Hillary is "blaming the victim" for suggesting that the Iraq government is responsible for what is going wrong there. I wonder: is collusion with if not sponsoring of sectarian death squads noted for drilling holes in the heads of abductees (or is that the Sunnis? I can never remember) really the stuff of victimhood? I don't trust Mrs. Clinton for an instant nor do I think blaming the Iraqi government will satiate the middle American populists the way that blaming the Iraqi people might (this motif is returning to AM radio for the first time since the 1970s), but in a certain way she's right: the Shiite-led government clearly did not offer enough concessions to satisfy the humiliated Sunni minority (even if I'm uncertain they might have been satisfied with anything short of the heads of the Shiite leadership).

Posted by Linus | June 20, 2007 9:12 PM

but bombing troublesome countries is as American as apple pie. Pull yourselves together.

I really, hope you never sat around and wondered "why do they hate us". When this whole thing goes south and the alien anthropolgists are diging around trying to figure out what happened here, and they find that that little gem it just might belong in a textbook in the future.

Posted by Ed Marshall | June 20, 2007 9:38 PM

Yeah, Fred, when you're not the one being bombed it's all just a big yawn, isn't it.

I have a feeling that if a bomb fell on Tel Aviv you'd see it as quite the disaster.

Posted by mq | June 20, 2007 10:52 PM

Oh, and what Ed said.

Posted by mq | June 20, 2007 10:53 PM

Edwards fundamentals are not that different now than in '04.

They're very different. '04 Edwards had a totally different and much worse health care plan, didn't have anything like the contemporary excellent Edwards plan on climate change...

You are right, but I'm not completely wrong. It depends on how you define 'fundamentals'. I don't mean it in a basketball sense. Yes, he is much more ambitious now and a much better candidate, but he always had the inclination to do a kind of radical analysis, which is why I was for him then (in addition to the fact that he had the best shot at beating Bush) and why I'm for him now. In '04, his big issues were poverty/middle class empowerment and official corruption (look at how he attacked Cheney vis a vis Halliburton and Iran)/legal corruption (political finance). A bit ahead of the curve there, no? And he had the discipline to stick to those themes - too much discipline perhaps; I heard the 'Two Americas' speech about 10 too many times. But the basic approach was there. His internal pres. campaign motto in '04 was 'Act; don't react'. That is a key - fundamental - attitude which hasn't changed. It's why he's a leader.

Posted by jonnybutter | June 21, 2007 12:46 AM