Shocked, I Am Shocked

Scott McClellan, President Bush’s former Press Secretary who served in the White House for six years, has written a just published book that blasts the White House for its disastrous Iraq strategy, its Katrina performance, and stops just short of accusing the President and his top aides of lying to the public. He describes Bush as an incurious individual, who stubbornly refused to admit mistakes, and centered his entire approach to his job on getting reelected in 2004.

The White House response has been not to deny the accusations but to accuse McClellan of “disloyalty” and to wonder why he didn’t raise these issues when he was employed, as if anyone disagreeing with the established administration policy had any chance of being heard or remaining employed.

How anyone can be surprised by this ‘revelation’ is what is shocking, not what McClellan reveals.

Hearing again about our incompetent President and his failure to deal with reality, unfortunately makes me think of Hilary Clinton’s campaign. Starting as a Clinton supporter and watching horrific misstep after misstep, I’ve become more and more appalled at what she and Bill are willing to do to return to the White House.

First a complete misunderstanding of the steps needed to succeed in the Democratic primary by ignoring the ‘small’ states and assuming she would easily be nominated by just showing up. Than the occurrence of frequent leadership changes and a campaign staff with lowered morale. This was followed by the employment of the Republican race card in South Carolina and the call for “white voters” to support her in the Midwest. The final blow for me is her complete hypocrisy regarding the seating of Florida and Michigan delegations.

She obviously missed out on the benefits of Title Nine and never played team sports as a child where participants learn that you do not change the rules in the middle of games.

All Democratic candidates agreed that Florida and Michigan would be penalized for moving their primary dates forward. No campaign was run in either state. But Hilary wants to count those votes because they are in her favor, without bothering to explain what her position would be if the majority of those uncontested votes went elsewhere.

Completely ignoring the illogical position she holds, she continues to claim that she should get these votes, that she leads in the popular vote, and that she won in states that have more electoral votes than Obama. What she doesn’t lead in are delegates to the convention, which is the only thing that matters. Repeating things that aren’t true until people tune out or assume in the recesses of their minds that they are true, is standard Bush practice over the past 7 ½ years. If Clinton somehow wins this nomination, I am going to have a really difficult time voting for her. I am approaching the stage where I would rather see Obama lose to McCain than have Clinton defeat him.

The key to success in November for the Democratic Party is to make this election a referendum on the Bush years. It doesn’t really matter if McCain is perceived as different from Bush, which I don’t believe he is on major issues like Iraq and the economy. What he is, is a continuation of Republican governance, and that approach has failed so horrendously and done such harm to the United States that its practitioners need to be cast into the wilderness and thrown out of office.

Recount II: Return to the Swamp is The New Republic editorial published: Wednesday, June 11, 2008:

It is usually a mistake to read too deeply into the character of a presidential candidate on the basis of some tactical maneuver or grubby compromise. Anybody who was a saint wouldn't be in the position of running for the White House. And yet, Hillary Clinton's speech last week in Florida was so audacious, so divorced from reality, that it begs characterological questions.

In the speech, Clinton--summoning as much passion and moral fervor as she has mustered at any point in the campaign--demanded that the Florida and Michigan delegations be seated at the Democratic National Convention. She compared her cause to abolition and women's suffrage. And--perhaps even more outrageous to those of us who have lived through the last eight years but weren't around for Seneca Falls--she said the Democratic Party and Barack Obama were reenacting the Republican effort to prevent the Florida recount in 2000.

It is a repellent comparison. "I remember very well back in 2000," she said. "There were those who argued that people's votes should be discounted over technicalities." We remember back in 2007, when Hillary Clinton was one of the people arguing that Florida's and Michigan's votes should be discounted. Her ostensible discovery of the absolute moral principle that every state delegation must be seated in full, whether or not its primary was contested, is purely instrumental and highly dubious.
The fight over the scheduling of the primaries is not one that ought to seize anybody's moral imagination. The current primary system is fairly silly, with Iowa and New Hampshire clinging to outsized roles without any particular justification save precedent. Florida and Michigan, however, did not move their primaries forward in the calendar to advance a principle or improve a flawed system. They did so to increase their own political leverage. They were willing to risk losing some or even all of their seated delegates because they craved the p.r. value that accompanies the earliest primary contests--and they pursued this attention with the full knowledge that it might ultimately cost them.

But, if this whole contretemps can be traced back to an irrational system for nominating candidates and the recklessness of two states, Clinton won't acknowledge it. Last week, she declared that "not counting Florida and Michigan is changing a central governing rule of this country--that whenever we can understand the clear intent of the voters, their votes should be counted." This is a deliberately misleading conflation of the two meanings of the word "count.” The ballots of the Florida primary were, in fact, counted. The prize that both sides understood to be at stake--bragging rights about a big-state victory--was awarded to the winner, Hillary Clinton. That the votes would not produce delegates was something she and her supporters understood well in advance.

Nevertheless, her comparison to the 2000 election does resonate in one crucial respect. In 2000, George W. Bush's campaign and its allies invented and discarded principles whenever it suited them. They called hand counts of ballots inherently unreliable. They insisted on following the letter of the law except in cases, like military ballots, where it benefited them. This proved to be a foreboding premonition of how Bush would use power as president.

Likewise, Clinton's behavior in this case offers a window into her temperament. She appears to have retreated into a cocoon of self-righteousness and unreality. Her management of this issue--and, in some ways, the whole campaign--echoes her management of health care reform back in her husband's first term.

In that debacle, Hillary Clinton's efforts foundered thanks to a host of now-familiar factors. There was her reliance on incompetent advisers. In 1993, her chief guide was Ira Magaziner, who managed to alienate all those around him. As Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala later told author Sally Bedell Smith, "[Magaziner] assumed you were a fool if you asked a question. Bill and Hillary were fascinated by him. They thought he was a genius." In today's Hillaryland, Magaziner has, of course, been superseded by Mark Penn.

Above all, Clinton displayed an inability to grasp the process, confusing dissent with disloyalty, a mindset that ultimately put her out of touch with political reality. J. Bradford DeLong, then a Treasury Department economist, later recalled:
So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior Hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate.

When Clinton came to the Senate, she made every effort to show that she had learned from her mistakes. But, in her capacity as candidate, she is an executive again, and it's clear that little has changed. The one positive quality that even her critics concede she has demonstrated is that she's a "fighter." There was a candidate like that during the 2000 Florida recount, too--a fighter who considered victory his birthright and who, unlike his opponent, would not let ethical reservations hold him back. That was George W. Bush.