Tuesday, March 11, 2008

The fence is getting hotter

It’s always been hard for me to get very excited about primary season. I look at the issues, I vote my conscience, and I mostly ignore the intraparty bickering as much as possible.

So far, I’ve been trying to remain carefully neutral regarding the Obama vs Clinton brouhaha. Almost a month ago, I said that I’d been refusing to be swayed by those who just despise the Clintons for some past dreck. Frankly, their pasts have been so besmirched by the GOP fecesfest that I’d be hard pressed to tell what’s truth and what’s fiction at this point. I’d rather focus on what’s going on now.

Unfortunately, it isn’t pretty.

Clinton wings Obama on advisor’s remarks on NAFTA

Back on February 9, Senator Obama’s senior economic policy adviser, Austan Goolsbee (with a name like that, is there any chance he would have been anything but an economist?), met with Georges Rioux, the consul general for the Canadian government, at Rioux’s consular office in Chicago. A memorandum was subsequently written by a consulate staff member as a summary for the Canadian ambassador (Michael Wilson) which stated, among other things,

This would, by necessity, be talking about the North American Free Trade Agreement, known generally as NAFTA. Moreover, it’s a necessarily accurate statement in that context. Campaign rhetoric does not equate to specific plans, and the more complex the topic, the more true that happens to be.

Thankfully in this day and age, more details regarding candidates’ policies are available on their websites, and there is less of a need to guess what a candidate’s specific proposals are. Looking through Senator Obama’s website, it’s clear that he wants to amend NAFTA so that it doesn’t negatively impact US jobs as much as it does, that he wants to make sure that any trade agreements enforce standards in labor and environmental impact, and helping those whose jobs have been impacted to transition to new careers.

Nothing spectacularly surprising here; it’s a stance one would expect of a pro-labor Democratic candidate, and a fairly moderate one at that. I’m not sure NAFTA is really to blame for most of our economics woes at the moment, but it’s certainly seen that way in the Midwest, and I’m not against reexamining the agreement some fifteen years after it was signed.

I’m also thinking that such reassurances for the Canadians aren’t such a bad thing. Canada isn’t really the sticking point regarding NAFTA. Most of the perception about NAFTA imbalances focuses on Mexico, whose exports to the US have more than quadrupled in the last fifteen years—but then, our exports to Mexico have tripled in the same period of time. Yet NAFTA is seen by many in Ohio as a colossal mistake because of the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico in the ’80s and ’90s.

But Mexico is no longer the big worry—that is now China, and the last I checked, China is not part of NAFTA.

Look, unburdening borders to trade is generally a good thing for an economy at large, but it isn’t necessarily good for all those in that economy. Democrats want to reexamine NAFTA to try to find a better balance? Fine by me—I’m not a militant regarding free trade, and I don’t mind those who wish to take a closer look at its effects, or those who wish to mediate its less positive effects. But at the same time, I don’t think that stopping the economic ebb and flow across the borders is what anyone wants.

Since then, however, the Clinton campaign has been calling this evidence that the Obama campaign is doing some double-dealing—creating manipulative rhetoric on the campaign trail while assuring other countries in private conference that no change is intended. There’s no real evidence of that, as yet. In the meantime, the Obama campaign and Goolsbee himself have been claiming that the Canadian memo did not reflect a direct quote, but instead an erroneous paraphrase.

The original quote (or paraphrase) didn’t seem all that inflammatory to me, but the screeching from the Clinton campaign was well-timed: it hit just before the Ohio primaries, and probably tipped the balance in favor of the Clinton campaign.

(Interestingly, the Clinton campaign website has even fewer details on what its trade proposals will be—just some bland remarks about ensuring “that trade policies work for average Americans” and that they “must raise our standard of living and they must have strong protections” for labor and environment.)

Clinton wings Obama over advisor’s remarks on Clinton and Iraq

After the Obama campaign’s defeat in the Ohio primaries, one of that campaign’s advisors, Samantha Power, told The Scotsman in a book-tour interview that: “She [Clinton] is a monster, too—that is off the record—she is stooping to anything.”

“Off the record” is a code phrase in journalism. Most journalistic codes of ethics say that off-the-record information may not be used either with or without attribution unless another source offers the information on the record independently. There are rules to this, though—“off the record” information is supposed to be agreed to before the fact, and retroactive claims of “off the record” are not generally accepted.

In this case, however, you’d think the remark might have been given a pass. Power was interviewing to promote her book (on a remarkable representative of the UN, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who died in Baghdad of a truck-bomb attack in 2003), and was clearly voicing some private, off-topic frustration about the campaign. Yet The Scotsman printed it anyway (oh, imagine the outcry if this had been an advisor for a Republican candidate! oh, the liberal European media!).

Subsequently, Ms Power issued an apology, the Obama campaign disavowed the remarks, and Power abruptly resigned from Senator Obama’s campaign.

Certainly Power’s remarks were unfortunate. The press—European or American—has long since ceased to emphasize balanced, rational coverage. Unguarded remarks will almost certainly be promoted heavily to increase readership, and no restraint or decorum will be in evidence. Speaking to the press, unfortunately, is something that should be done carefully, with precision; revealing anything other than what your core message is will likely get you into trouble.

(In fact, it seems to me that reporters are shooting themselves in the foot with this tactic. Being kinder to interview subjects would better inform their reporting, resulting in better, more informative stories. Instead, by consistently burning anyone for off-the-cuff remarks, they simply ensure fewer off-the-cuff remarks, carefully canned statements, and less actual information to work with.)

In any case, this was an unfortunate, non-sanctioned remark that was quickly dealt with.

Power also made some comments in a BBC program called Hard Talk regarding the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Senator Obama’s campaign website says that his plan for Iraq is to withdraw one or two combat brigades each month, and have all brigades out of Iraq within sixteen months. Power implied that this was a best-case scenario, and that he would revisit it when he became president.

The host tried to pin her down by asking her whether this was a false commitment. Power quite reasonably responded thusly: “You can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009. He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a US Senator. He will rely upon a plan—an operational plan—that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground to whom he doesn’t have daily access now, as a result of not being the president. So to think—it would be the height of ideology to sort of say, ‘Well, I said it, therefore I’m going to impose it on whatever reality greets me.’”

In short, Obama would wait to make specific decisions until he became president and had access to all the classified information that the president has at hand.

That’s a perfectly reasonable assertion, but that hasn’t stopped the Clinton campaign from harping on it, going so far as to say that Obama is not really that against the Iraq war. Of course, Clinton hasn’t set any suggested timetable (and has said that she would assess the situation in January of 2009, for the same reasons), but Clinton campaign representatives have called into question Obama’s “resolve and conviction” more than once over Power’s remarks.

Clinton herself said: “[Obama] has attacked me continuously for having no hard exit date and now we learn that he doesn’t have one—in fact he doesn’t have a plan at all according to his top foreign policy adviser.”

This is disingenuous at best. Obama has a more firmly stated proposed plan than Clinton does. The specifics of that plan will have to wait until he gains access to classified information, just like Clinton’s will have to be.

So the Clinton campaign is burning Obama for wanting more information before making specific commitments, and wanting to retain the right to reassess the situation in light of that additional information before making specific operational plans.

That’s kind of insane, really. Those are things the Clinton campaign would surely want as well, even if it had the courage to state what its intentions were.

Ken Starr?

As Obama has been responding to Clinton’s attacks, and fairly rationally at that, the Clinton campaign has merely stepped up the pace of those attacks.

Clinton has brought up Obama’s real-estate dealings with Tony Rezko (which he himself as described as “boneheaded” on his part, even though those dealings took place months before Rezko was charged with influence peddling). Obama has not been accused of any wrongdoing, or even committing any ethics violations, and subsequent to Rezko’s indictment, donated Rezko’s campaign contributions to charity. Nor did he conduct any government business with Rezko.

Obama’s campaign responded by comparing the Rezko “scandal” with the Whitewater “scandal,” in which Bill Clinton was dubiously accused of pressuring a fraudulent (and at the time, convicted) lender to make an illegal $300,000 loan to the Whitewater Development Corporation. The accusations were questionable at best, and suspicious to boot; three independent investigations showed that there wasn’t any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Clintons.

The Clinton campaign responded with “Well, okay, yeah, we’ve both had false scandals attributed to us, our bad, let’s go on to other issues.”

Well, except no, they didn’t do that—that would have been a reasonable course of action.

Instead, they claimed the the Obama campaign was using “Ken Starr” tactics to attack the Clinton campaign.

The Obama campaign characterized this, quite rightly, as “absurd.”

The upshot

Both campaigns are swinging a bit, but from my vantage point, it appears that the Clinton campaign is consistently going for the sucker punch. The Obama campaign seems to be concentrating on things that are actually said or done; the Clinton campaign appears to be consistently making wild and unfounded extrapolations based on things that are fairly reasonable when examined without the screeching accusations.

A couple of weeks ago, I said that Obama invariably came off as more presidential with this sort of infighting—he seems to take a consistent stance that he’s not going to fight dirty, and he is continuing to voice a message of hope and change, along with some inevitable frustration with Clinton’s negative campaign tactics.

In fact, her tactics have been so consistently negative of late that they directly endanger the sense of Democratic unity that the party is going to need in November. With so much bad blood being generated by the Clinton campaign, it’s hard to see how a Clinton/Obama or Obama/Clinton ticket can ever come about (note—I wrote those in alphabetical order, not in order of preference).

It appears that the Clinton campaign has become so focused on the presidency that they’ve lost sight of what the country needs right now, what the country craves right now—whereas Obama continues to focus on what will move this nation towards a hopefully brighter future.

But the final straw for me was when Clinton claimed that both she and John McCain would be bringing a lifetime of experience to the White House, whereas Barack Obama would “bring a speech he gave in 2002.” Denigrating a possible Democratic presidential nominee in favor of the Republican presidential nominee? Denigrating Senator Obama’s life experience, as though it were worth less than either Clinton’s or McCain’s? Not a single one of these candidates has experience as President of the United States. Some of our most respected Presidents have had little legislative or executive experience. This insulting and petty remark is . . . well, asinine, and in my opinion, Clinton should have apologized for it as soon as possible. Instead, she stood by it.

So my own neutrality has come to an end.

I no longer believe that Hillary Clinton will give the Democratic party a good chance of winning this November, even if her ego would permit her to be Vice President.

To be clear: I believe that if Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, or even appears on the ticket, the Democrats will endanger their attempt to gain the White House, and very possibly would endanger their attempt to gain more seats in the House and Senate.

This wasn’t the result of any other rhetoric by anyone else. I’m not worried about accusations by the Obama camp; I don’t care about Whitewater, I think the Lewinsky affair was an overblown and irresponsible (and expensive) witch-hunt, and I don’t believe that anyone had Vince Foster killed. This was the direct result of recent and escalating sentiments of the Clinton campaign—both in her words directly, and in the words of her campaign spokespeople which went unrefuted by the candidate.

This is about things she has actually said, and her campaign has said that she supports.

At heart, I’m very disappointed—and concerned, because as Clinton begins to alienate Democrats with her accusations, she will get progressively more desperate and strident, and that could damage the Democratic party across the board. The nation cannot afford another Republican administration just now—not until the GOP comes to its senses and starts living by the ethics and common sense it claims to have.

But mostly, I’m disappointed. I had higher hopes—and expectations—for Senator Clinton.