Engaging today's political economy
with truth and reason

sponsored by

Missives from the Morass: DNC Style

29 Jul 2016

The City of Brotherly Shove hosted the Democratic National Convention. Wisely, I did not attend.

The DNC was, like its GOP counterpart, a historic affair. At the end of it all, a major party nominated a person uniquely unfit for the presidency. Granted, Hillary Rodham Clinton is a woman, but as she would surely prefer, we should evaluate her based on her merits, ideas, and talents. She shows herself lacking on all fronts.

As a modern politician, where Donald Trump is somehow both puffed up and monosyllabic simultaneously, Mrs. Clinton is mechanical. The old joke with Al Gore was, how do you tell the Vice President apart from his Secret Service detail? He is the wooden one. For Mrs. Clinton, she strikes one as the Tin WoMan, rusted solid, in need of lubricated joints and a heart. Admittedly, this is just an image on the screen. I have never met or interacted with Mrs. Clinton, so it could well be she comes off very differently privately and in smaller groups. Also, I am not arguing I could do better, but in our current political environment, she is not a natural politician. As a rule, the better tv presence wins in modern presidential politics. Perhaps only against Trump’s rampant gasbaggery could Mrs. Clinton claim an advantage.

In 2012, according to exit polls, Mr. Romney outstripped Mr. Obama on nearly all questions of leadership and vision, but Mr. Obama was seen as more in touch with “people like me” and that proved decisive in many voters’ minds. How will Mrs. Clinton fare on such a question? She may need to modify her empathy sub-routines to incorporate such queries.

When we step past image, Mrs. Clinton finds herself in a bit of a bind. She has sought to portray herself as a historic change agent and as President Obama’s third term in office. She is, then, a product and an architect of his largest failures on foreign policy–ISIS, Syria, Libya, and the shocking growth of domestic terrorism. A slim majority of Americans are still convinced the country is on the wrong track. The “3rd Term” may be a hard sell. What about change? When given the chance, Mrs. Clinton embraced Mr. Sanders’ tired explosion of government. Free college, free child care, and, one presumes, freedom from the drag on our national coffers. In terms of policy, she charged hard left to win the nomination and she continued those themes last night.

Wrapped up in all of this, of course, is how she is perceived in matters of trust and favorability. In a recent CNN poll, only 30% of respondents view Mrs. Clinton as honest. Her email problems, where the Director of the F.B.I. essentially called her a liar repeatedly and publicly, dog her, but they are representative of her whiplash inducing shift on policy during the past two decades. Mrs. Clinton has moved from a relatively moderate Clinton Administration (which signed N.A.F.T.A., Welfare Reform, D.O.M.A., and declared the “era of big government is over”) to leftist progressivism. This helped her ward off Mr. Sanders’ challenge in the primaries, but those same progressives have disavowed her as a corporate shill and a crony capitalist. The massive slush-fund known as the Clinton Global Initiative feeds into the perspective.

I laughed out loud when Chelsea Clinton referred to her mother’s “public service.” Mrs. Clinton may indeed have strong ideals and she may wish to help the public. I don’t want to challenge those motives. But, what other figure has gone into politics with virtually no money and later emerged as being worth tens of millions of dollars? The “public” has ultimately allowed the Clintons to cash in at historic levels. Honestly, it is funny when Mrs. Clinton decries the cost of education, and the debt burden students carry, but then cashes $300,000 checks for speaking at public universities. The Clintons have engaged in an elaborate long game that has transformed their family away from modesty and toward lavish wealth. I don’t mind the wealth. I just mind the means by which it was collected.

Count me among the 70% of the country that sees Mrs. Clinton as dishonest. Combined with her cavalier attitude toward national security, as revealed by her handling of classified material, and by her failed tenure as Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton is unfit for the presidency.

What does it say about our country that our two major parties, through largely democratic means, have managed to nominate these two at the same time? “Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right.” Here we are, simply stuck.

Finally, let me make one note, not originally, about the gaping hole that Mr. Trump’s nomination opened for Mrs. Clinton. If you listened at all to her speech last night, she sounded many traditionally Republican themes. She called on our founders and their documents. She castigated the notion that one man can solve our problems. She even painted Trump as out-of-step with people like Reagan. This reality allowed her to appeal to disaffected Republicans convinced Trump is not tolerable. These were the most effective parts of her speech, at least to me. Obviously, these arguments would not have been available to her if she were running against Rubio, Cruz, Kasich, or Bush.

Let’s just vote and get it over with. I am already tired of this election.