Senator Clinton,
I doubt you would remember me, but I had the honor of meeting you, briefly, at the 1996 Inaugural Ball held in honor of your husband's reelection. I was the date for your exhausted personal assistant from the DNC. I was grateful for the few moments we spent chatting, so I feel as if I owe you something. I'd like to repay your kindness with a little unsolicited advice.
I know your time is valuable, so I'll cut to the chase: I don't want you to be president of the United States, and after today’s primary in Pennsylvania I hope you will withdraw from the Democratic race. I believe your candidacy is doomed, and that it has divided a party desperately in need of unity and cohesion. I don't have anything against you personally, nor do I have a problem with the concept of a female president. I just don't like the idea of dynasties in American politics. They usually don't work out too well (see Kennedy, Bush, et al), and the idea that someone who's in their mid-twenties will have known only two names - Bush and Clinton - as presidents of our fair republic bothers me a great deal. The other issue that concerns me is how you've run - or not run - your campaign, which doesn't bode well for you being able to run the Executive Branch. Watching your campaign increasingly reminds me of that old BBC production of “I, Claudius”, only not as well written.
I do have a problem with the "Clinton Machine", the vast, left-wing monster that grew during your husband's years as POTUS, and which you have expanded after carpet-bagging your way into a Senate seat from New York. It's a massive beast that you and Bill have created, this cult-of-personality tag-team thing. There are a lot of people depending on you, some of whom have been donating to the Clinton coffers for more than 16 years. Of course, by continuing your moribund campaign you're only doing what the backers of the Clinton Machine expect of you; pushing the agenda that you have been paid to push forward. That's how politics in the US is done. Except that there is a feeling abroad that doing the same things the same old ways won’t cut it anymore. The world has changed, and you haven’t. In fact, you’ve regressed, and your voting record in the Senate is proof of that. You may have been a person of the Left for a while, but you have clearly moved back to the political position you started in as a teenager - you're a Goldwater Girl. Oh, and did I mention that I think you were a calculating coward not to oppose the War in Iraq? You knew as a woman and as a hopeful presidential candidate that to oppose war in America is to seem weak in the face of threats. You let political calculus trump reality, and that is something we can ill afford.
At the time you first started to campaign for the presidency - which coincides exactly with your initial run for the Senate - redeploying the Clinton Machine made some sense. You hoped to run for the White House after Al Gore had done his stint as president. But then things went terribly, horribly wrong. Bush was brought to power by an interventionist Supreme Court, Al Gore was sent home to grow a beard, and then your candidacy seemed all the more crucial for the sake of the Party. After 9/11 the country quailed in abject fear, and the Bush gang exploited that fear to start wars of choice, and to solidify a police state, throwing the Constitution out the window. Things in Afghanistan and Iraq went much worse than almost anyone expected. The economy tanked - and is still tanking, with no real end in sight. The Bush presidency became not only a failure, but a corrupt, incompetent and criminal enterprise that sucked the life out of this country, and did enormous damage worldwide, including a loss of life and treasure that is almost incalculable.
Going into this election cycle after seven disastrous years of BushCo., you were the presumptive Democratic nominee and likely President Elect, and little seemed to stand in your way besides the formality of actually going through the tedious primary process, which would give you a good look at the other, lesser candidates, some of whom you might pick for cabinet positions, if they played nice. Pretty straightforward. Easy-peasy. But then something happened, threw a wrench in the works; history intervened.
More importantly for your campaign, an unlikely junior Senator from Illinois emerged as a contender for the Democratic ticket, and his ideas and gift of oratory stunned many. Barack Obama quickly emerged as the front runner, and you and the massive Clinton Machine were caught on the back foot. You have never recovered, and even despite a possibly decisive victory today in Pennsylvania, your campaign’s prospects look grim indeed. The presidency of the United States of America is of global importance. Many sense that much more hangs in the balance this election cycle than what budgetary earmarks for how much will go where. This isn't politics as usual, despite all of your efforts to contain this election within those knowable, easily scripted bounds.
I, for one, did not expect the candidacy of Barack Obama to be at all interesting, which was cynical of me. Until rather recently, I knew little of the man, and presumed that America was no more likely to elect him than Mike Bloomberg. But then I saw some of his speeches on TV, and I watched some debates, I read some of Obama's policy statements, and I began to wonder... "what if?" Then I looked at my young daughter, who is of mixed race (half Japanese, and half my mongrel European self), and I began to realize that Obama represents a type of change I hadn't imagined being possible. But it is. Many people feel the same way. What Obama offers is generational change. For the last 40 years American politics has been mostly about the concerns of 1968 - and the battles have done enormous harm to our country and not much good. While you and other baby-boomers were fighting the old battles, new threats and new issues have emerged and been given short shrift in Washington and in the media. The time has come to drop those old battles which have framed political debate in this country and to pass the torch to a new generation.
The Democratic Party has had the 28 years since Ronald Reagan was first elected to come up with an opposing doctrine to that of the Conservatives, and the Democratic Party has done damn near nothing in response. In this sense, and quite a few others as well, the Democratic Party has been an abject failure, relying instead on the pragmatic but slimy practice of money politics. The Clinton Machine didn't start Big Money politics, it just extended it beyond most people’s wildest imaginings. While in office, your husband offered no true change, but a middle way, a “Third Way”, which sounded conciliatory and realist, but in the end it did little to change the course of the country in terms of foreign affairs or to alleviate the problems faced by average Americans. In fact, the rich got richer and fed the Machine, while the poor got poorer and were increasingly forgotten and ultimately disenfranchised.
People want change. They really do. Many Americans are in a “throw the bums out” mode. You offer nothing more than a slightly more moderate and humane set of options than the sclerotic conservatism of John McCain. That isn't good enough, not if our republic is to survive. Bush 43 gave us an inkling of what an American Emperor would be like, and I fear that should you be elected, you'll show us the visage of an Empress.
If you become president, would you hand back to Congress and the people the powers Bush accrued to himself as Commander in Chief? Whatever you say on the campaign trail, I doubt that you would. For someone that finds power so intoxicating, I think you will face that choice and decide - wrongly - that you could do great good with those expanded and unconstitutional powers. Besides, the people who pay you to run, your deep-pocketed supporters, will like the idea of someone with powers beyond what is legitimate to force their will upon the country.
The policies that have shaped America's role in the world since WW2 need to be changed. Containment had its successes and its failures. The Neocon's "preemptive" strategy failed upon launch, although they’re still trying to put a happy face on it (good luck with that). The old faces that shaped these policies need to be replaced by younger ones that see different opportunities and dangers. We need a new Tom Paine or Thomas Jefferson to counteract all the Hamiltonian excesses of the last 3 decades.
What you don't seem to recognize is that people have moved on - what worked in the go-go 90s won't work today. Things are far more broken in Washington, and both you and your husband had something to do with that, I'm sorry to say. You've mastered the Beltway, but that is a far cry from being prepared to be a good president. You represent everything that is wrong with Washington, and everything that needs to be changed.
I’m not so naive as to believe that Barack Obama can change Washington all by himself, or that whatever changes he does make cannot be easily swept away by the old power brokers that run things, but I think it is time to give a chance to a younger generation not obsessed with the issues of 1968. Most important of all, Obama offers something else that you cannot - a grassroots, from-the-bottom-up campaign that can reverse the apathetic trends of the last 40 years. With that, there is hope of change because it demands that we citizens get involved. In contrast, your campaign - like Bush’s hubristic and foolish vision of democratizing the Middle East by force - is a top-down affair, wherein corporations are of primary importance and the will of the people matters little, if at all.
If we as people don’t accept a soft revolution now, I believe we will face a hard revolution in the not-so-distant future - or worse. I see this country at a historical crossroads. The signs are everywhere of our sliding decline. We will either change now or fall like all the empires before us... dust into dust.
When I think back to that night of the Inaugural Ball and the DNC party afterwards, I can see James Carville, beer bottle in one hand, dancing upon one foot, hooting with joy as he expressed his inner hillbilly. It was all so excessive, so wasteful. Inside the world of Washington politics the drinks were free and unending, while outside in the streets of Washington D.C., homeless people begged for money at the darkened windows of passing limousines filled with celebrants being whisked from one gala event to the next. That reality wasn’t covered by ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC or any major papers, but it has stayed with me, and I recognize in it a vision of decline that must be reversed for all of our sakes.
Sincerely,
Laurence Turner
PS - please send my thanks to Bill again for the gift of the pen that he signed something with.
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