http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9904609
long, but an interesting read.
long, but an interesting read.
Ready to run the movie again?
Oct 4th 2007 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
The betting is that the Clintons will follow the Bushes back into the White House
THE September 29th issue of the National Journal, an inside-the-Beltway magazine, contains a striking news item. Hillary Clinton has quietly signed a deal with the University of Illinois to house her presidential library. The university will put up $15m to help finance the construction and operation of the huge building on its Urbana-Champaign campus, close to where Hillary Rodham was born.
This was, of course, a jokebut it contains a serious point. The political establishment is betting heavily that Hillary Clinton will become America's next president. And it has reason. Mrs Clinton is way out in front of the Democratic field. The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll puts her 33 points ahead of Barack Obama and 40 points ahead of John Edwards. She raised $22m in the last quartermore than Mr Obama at $19m and much more than Mr Edwards at $7m. The once-mighty Republican Party is a shadow of its former self, divided not only about who should lead it but also about where it should go. Intrade, a pay-to-play prediction market, shows a 36% chance of the Republicans holding the White House alongside a 12% chance of them taking the House and a 7% chance they might take the Senate.
Politicos invariably hedge all this around with qualifications. Howard Dean was well ahead of the Democratic field at this stage of the electoral cycle in 2004. Mr Obama might make a breakthrough in Iowa (where he is nipping Mrs Clinton's heels) and gain enough momentum to win the nomination. Mrs Clinton might stumble and fall. The American electorate might balk at the idea of handing both the White House and Capitol Hill to a single party and go for a Republican president. All possible, of course; but all less likely by the day. Mrs Clinton is not only the front-runner. She is well on the way to becoming a prohibitive front-runner.
This is an extraordinary situation, for all sorts of reasons. The race ought to be wide open: it is the first time that neither party has an incumbent, in the form of a vice-president, since 1928. The rise of the netroots has transferred political power from the Washington establishment to smaller donors. And America is in an anti-establishment mood: the Democratic Congress has even lower approval ratings, at about 27%, than George Bush. Yet Mrs Clinton has all the advantages of an incumbent, from a brand name to an established political machine, without many of the disadvantages.
And this too is odd, since she is one of the most hated figures in American politics. During the 1990s she embodied everything that conservatives hate about female professionals: a bossy harridan who disparaged stay-at-home mothers, tried to reorganise the health-care system that makes up one-seventh of the American economy, and stayed with her tom-catting husband to further her political ambitions. Conservative conferences regularly feature loo-paper with Hillary's face on it and Hillary trolls to throw balls at. CafePress, a web retailer, is selling more than 100,000 anti-Hillary items, including a Hillary is the Devil beer stein.
But Hillary-hatred is by no means confined to the right. David Geffen, a Hollywood mogul, gave voice to a widespread feeling on the left when he complained about the Clintons' relationship with truth. Everybody in politics lies, he told the New York Times. But they do it with such ease, it's troubling. Mrs Clinton has some of the highest negatives of any politician in the business.
And yet here she is, with her husband, looking likely to break all sorts of records. If she wins, Mrs Clinton will be the first female president of the United Statesa banner headline in itselfand Mr Clinton will be the first male first spouse. She will be the first president married to a former president. She will also be the first president who is married to a former president who was impeached for having oral sex with an intern in the Oval Office.
This raises all sorts of intriguing questions. How will the first couple be addressed? Mrs and Mr President? Mrs President and Mr Clinton? What will people call Mr Clinton? (He says that his Scottish friends have suggested first laddie.) And, more important, what will Mrs Clinton do with her husband? Back in 1992, the Clintons campaigned on the slogan Buy one, get one free. But Mrs Clinton's presidency will be doomed if she allows herself to be overshadowed by her more experienced and more charismatic spouse. Not for the first time, Mr Clinton is likely to be both her biggest asset and her biggest liability.
Senate training
The path for the Clinton restoration has been prepared by two thingsan implosion and a fizzle. The implosion was provided by the Republican Party, thanks to a combination of runaway spending and incompetence. Five years ago America was evenly divided by party identification: 43% for each party. This year the Democrats have a 50% to 35% advantage. Democratic presidential candidates have raised about 70% more than their Republican rivals. Ohio, Virginia and Colorado are leaning Democratic, and Pennsylvania has gone from a swing-state to a Democratic lock.
The fizzle has been provided by Mr Obama. He is an impressive candidate who still draws bigger and keener crowds than Mrs Clinton, but his performance in the presidential debates has often been listless. His message of new politics and reconciliation can seem tired. He has failed to appeal to blue-collar voters who think that politics is about problem-solving rather than inspiration. The fact that he has now fallen behind Mrs Clinton in fund-raising, where he was once comfortably ahead, is dismal news for his campaign.
Mrs Clinton has also positioned herself brilliantly for a presidential run after the traumas of her White House years. She has moved to the centre at a time when powerful forces have been pulling her party to the left. She has softened some of her rough edges, if only cosmetically. And she has accumulated yet more political capital.
Her repositioning started with her Senate run in 2000. She chose to live in suburban Chappaqua, rather than Manhattan, in order to blunt her image as a liberal elitist. She focused on small-bore issues rather than grand schemes, and campaigned relentlessly in the more conservative farming districts. The result was that she won re-election with majorities not just in Manhattan but also upstate.
She also proved to be an exemplary senator. Trent Lott once mused that lightning might strike her before she set foot in the chamber; five years later, according to Joshua Green in the Atlantic Monthly, he became one of 49 Republicans who have sponsored legislation with her. She has been a regular at Senate prayer breakfasts, where something of the old bipartisan Senate survives. She has listened patiently to ancient denizens such as Robert Byrd (who advised her to be a work horse not a show horse). She could hardly have done better at managing her twin positions as junior senator and global celebrity.
Outside the Senate, Hillary has displayed the same singleness of purpose. She has relentlessly courted religious voters (whose relationship with the Republican Party is increasingly strained), describing abortion as a tragic choice, defining herself as a praying person, and employing evangelical Christians on her staff. She has repeatedly rebuffed attempts by the left to harden her opposition to the Iraq war, insisting that she will not foreclose any military options as president. She even appeared in a documentary about Barry Goldwater, praising the Arizona Republican and reminiscing about her first days in politics as a Goldwater girl.
She has also devoted a lot of effort to improving her party's infrastructure. She helped John Podesta, her husband's former chief of staff, to found a think-tank, the Centre for American Progress, which is a ready source of ideas and talent. She also supported the American Democracy Institute, which is run by veteran Clinton allies, and Media Matters for America, a media watchdog group, which was founded by David Brock, a former Clinton-hater turned Clintonite. All this helped to ensure that, for all the energy unleashed by the netroots and Al Gore, the Washington Democratic establishment has remained a wholly owned subsidiary of the Clinton family.
Mrs Clinton's careful repositioning has gone hand-in-hand with her husband's rehabilitation. What might be called Mr Clinton's lapses of judgment have faded from the public mind. He likes to remind people that yesterday's news was pretty good. His superstar status abroad is a rising asset in a country that is rightly worried about its global image. And Mr Clinton has had an energetic post-presidential career, raising piles of money for his charitable foundation as well as making a fortune for himself and forming a successful double act with George Bush senior, particularly after the tsunami in South-East Asia. He is now more popular among Democrats than when he left the White House, and more popular by far than his wife or any of her rivals. Some 88% of Democrats view him favourably.
The final piece of the Clinton puzzle is her formidable campaign machine. Mrs Clinton has assembled the best collection of pollsters, image-crafters, fund-raisers and hatchet-men in the business; and so far she has managed them successfully. Her campaign has been relentlessly smooth, if a bit mechanical (she is forever bursting out laughing, whether it is appropriate or not, to counteract the idea that she has no sense of humour).
This is also a campaign with teeth. Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa and close ally, told a cable news channel that the whole country would soon know as much about Rudy Giuliani's private life as New York knows already. Mr Clinton has also gone on record questioning whether Mr Obama has enough experience for the presidency, particularly in an age of terrorism. Mr Clinton had about as much experience in 1988, when he considered running but thought better of it.
Countering the negatives
Mrs Clinton still has strikingly high negatives: the latest Pew poll shows that 39% have an unfavourable view of her candidacy. But Mr Bush has proved that you can still win a presidential election while lots of people hate you. And Mrs Clinton is doing a goodish job of dealing with those negativescertainly good enough to pick up many disillusioned Republicans and restive independents.
Her biggest potential negative is her sex. Americans are highly sensitive to the fact that the president is also the commander-in-chiefand Mrs Clinton is a graduate of a White House that had notoriously bad relations with the military world. Men are also much less well-disposed to Mrs Clinton than women: 45% of men have a negative opinion of her and only 36% have a positive opinion. The figures for women are 31% negative to 45% positive. If George Bush senior reminded women of their first husband, Mrs Clinton reminds men of their first wife.
Yet Candidate Clinton is not running as a feminist. She made a point of serving on the Armed Services Committee in the Senate. She is by far the most hawkish of the current Democratic candidates. She repeatedly emphasises that she is not running as a female candidate. Most Americans are happy with the idea of a female president (if not with this particular female). And the presidential field is full of people who are different in some way, from John McCain, the oldest man to run for president, to Rudy Giuliani, the most divorced man to run for president, to Mitt Romney, who is a Mormon, to Dennis Kucinich, who is, well, Dennis Kucinich.
Mrs Clinton's second-biggest negative is that very executive ability. Her biggest experience of running something, rather than bending her husband's ear or voting in the Senate, proved a disaster. What she advertised as the most ambitious domestic reform since FDRher health-care plancollapsed in ruins in 1994.
But again she has moved smartly to deal with the problem. Her latest health-care plan is much more modest than her last, and it puts a heavy emphasis on choice rather than bureaucratic reorganisation. Given the level of worry in America about health care, among businesses as well as consumers, the Republicans will have to do more to discredit it than just resurrect taunts about Nanny Hillary.
Mrs Clinton now exudes an overwhelming air of competence. Mr Bush is widely regarded as one of the most incompetent presidents in American historya man who rushed blind into Baghdad, who filled his administration with lacklustre cronies, who bungled the handling of Hurricane Katrina and who famously claimed that he could not think of a single mistake he had made. Mrs Clinton is the anti-Bush: a woman who speaks in clear sentences, who has a formidable command of the facts, and who, on health care, is willing to learn from her mistakes.
The trouble with dynasties
What does the possibility of a Clinton restoration mean for America? Everything depends on whether Mrs Clinton can translate her air of competence into reality. The Clinton White House, be it remembered, lurched from crisis to crisis, some of them of Mrs Clinton's creation. It is also worth remembering that Mr Bush sold himself as an MBA president surrounded by political veterans. But three things are already clearone positive and two negative.
The positive is that Mrs Clinton would break America's highest glass ceiling. Women have made their mark in almost every area of American life, from the Senate (16 currently) to the House (74, including the speaker) to the governor's office (nine). Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice have both been secretary of state. In that respect, a woman president would undoubtedly be a good thing for the country.
But there is a downside: dynasty. If Mrs Clinton wins the White House in 2008, members of the Bush and Clinton families will have been president for 24 years on the trot. Over 100m Americans have never known anybody but a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. If Mrs Clinton wins re-election, that 24 years will swell to 28.
Americans are remarkably insouciant about this development. They should not be. It suggests that American political life is in the hands of a small group of insiders who are organised around semi-royal families. And it divides America into players, who control political life, and observers, who simply comment on it. The dynastification of American politics is happening at a time when economic inequalities are growing, and the haves are proving increasingly successful at transmitting their privileges to their children.
The other negative side is that it freezes American political life. One of the virtues of the American political system is that it is supposed to produce shake-ups whenever a new president takes over. Mrs Clinton will bring back the same cast of characters that everybody wearied of in the 1990s, from slick money-raisers like Terry McAuliffe to professional conservative-haters like Sidney Blumenthal.
Back in 1993 Jacob Weisberg, writing in the New Republic, accused the Clinton team of Clincestbeing a tight, hermetic and incestuous clique who went to the same universities and hung out at the same Democratic gabfests. Mrs Clinton's election will not only perpetuate Clincest for another four or eight years; it will also add another dollop of ageing baby-boomer self-satisfaction. During a campaign speech earlier this year Mr Clinton remarked that he once told Hillary, when they were both students at Yale, that I have met all the most gifted people in our generation and you're the best. This sort of attitude will be difficult to live with.
The Clintonites have already brought back some of their old bad habits. Mrs Clinton had to return $850,000 from a fund-raiser called Norman Hsu who turned out to be a fugitive. But even more dispiriting will be the continuing polarisation of American politics. Mrs Clinton may have damped down Hillary-hatred for a while. But it is sure to revive if she starts appointing Supreme Court justices. And Mrs Clinton is still surrounded by the same fanatically loyal and combative staff that she had in the 1990s. America will be stuck not just in the same tired culture war, but also in the same culture war fought by the same characters. The potential for further alienation from politics, particularly after the Bush years, will be huge.
Mrs Clinton is clearly a formidable candidate for the presidency. She has the most powerful name in the business now that the Bush brand is tarnished. She has a smoothly working political machine. She has a wealth of experience in both the legislative and the executive branch. And she exudes competence. All told, she looks likely to translate this into both the Democratic nomination and a victory in November 2008. But whether a Clinton restoration will be good for America is a much more difficult question.