This blog seriously cuts into my reading time. My stack of Christmas books is only beginning to dwindle. I just finished Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal, which, of course, I heartily recommend. Unlike the Great Unraveling, it is not merely a collection of his columns.
Krugman appears to be a Hillary supporter, primarily, I think, because he feels her health care plan is superior to Obama’s, which it probably is, if only marginally. He believes, with a great deal of justification, that health care is the defining issue of our time: if we get it right, then we will get a chain reaction of other progressive legislation. From reading his column, it appears that the policy wonk in him triumphed over the political analyst, for to my mind, his book makes a better case for Obama than Hillary. In one of his final pages Krugman observes:
During the Clinton years there wasn’t a progressive movement … and the nation paid a price. Looking back, it’s clear that Bill Clinton never had a well-defined agenda. …There were many reasons Hillary Clinton’s health care plan failed, but a key weakness was that it wasn’t an attempt to give substance to the goals of a broad movement-it was a personal venture, developed in isolation and without a supporting coalition. [After the defeat] Bill Clinton was reduced to making marginal policy changes. He ran the government well, but he didn’t advance a larger agenda, and he didn’t build a movement. This could happen again, but if if it does, progressives will feel rightly betrayed.
Even without the proof positive of the last few days, it’s always been clear that Hillary Clinton is stuck in that 90s paradigm. Her husband governed from a defensive crouch through circumstances only partly of his own making. He could make the case against Republican excesses, but was not so good at making the case for a progressive agenda. In point of fact, he never tried. He bought into the DLC vision of the world. If you believe you can only govern by pandering to the right, or blurring your differences, you can never achieve anything beyond small, incremental changes. Hillary is cut from the same cloth and molded by the same experiences. She cannot build a movement. She doesn’t see that as being part of her brief.
It is by no means clear that Obama can do better than Hillary, but the candidate of hope is really our only hope on this score. We need an unapologetic advocate for a progressive vision. That is not Hillary. It may not be Obama, but it might be Obama. We can only hope.
Somewhat related footnote: Obama says he will go after the criminals in the present administration, should he be elected. I devoutly hope that is true. I’m confident that Clinton would take the position that we should put trivial stuff like abuse of power and torture behind us. In addition to indictments, we need a Truth Commission. Not a “bi-partisan” coverup commission, but a commission stacked with people motivated to turn over all the rocks and expose the criminality to the light of day. My vote for AG, by the way, goes to Patrick Fitzgerald.
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