Hillary Clinton would be a far more transformative President than Barack Obama

[ruggerson]

Bill Clinton was a master triangulator. His was a coopting presidency in the grand, glorious tradition of Woodrow Wilson. He liberally borrowed from the opposing party’s agenda, incorporated it into his own, and effected change in small, incremental steps. His was a solid presidency, but not one that oversaw a dramatic sea change in American policy. He had the charm and the political skill to be a transformer, but he lacked the political will and the courage. The most memorable coopting Presidents of the last century were Wilson, Eisenhower, Nixon and Clinton. Co-opters often have successful presidencies, by and large, are roundly disliked by the opposing party and are usually re elected handily. Bill Clinton had many solid achievements and will be remembered as a good President.

Barack Obama essentially guarantees us that he will be a true Clintonian in both style and substance. His campaign rhetoric of hope and change is inextricably wedded to his promise of unity and bipartisanship. He is telling us that he wants to govern by compromise, a governing objective and method which are the very essence of coopting presidencies. He finds partisanship anathema, he seeks to find common ground with the opposing party: all vital ingredients of a coopting leadership style. This is exactly the kind of leadership which necessarily results in very cautious progress and slow, measured change. He is not making a secret of this. He is telegraphing what kind of President he wants to be by both words and deeds. He is promising us the very model of a coopting Presidency.

Hillary Clinton is a very different animal from both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. She is fiercely partisan and unapologetic about her beliefs. Her heroine is Eleanor Roosevelt, an unrelenting crusader.

The most transformative presidents of the 20th century were Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, LBJ and Ronald Reagan (the negative nightmare of the transformative Presidents). Obama was right in singling out Reagan as a transformer, but he mangled the comparison. Obama is not angling to be a liberal version of Reagan. He is angling to be a liberal version of the far more cautious Richard Nixon. FDR and Reagan were both highly partisan and deeply ideological. It is Hillary Clinton who fits this mold, not Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton is passionate about the progressive ideals she has fought for over her entire life. She is a crusader for national healthcare, for children, for the agenda of the working man and woman. She has political will and courage that her husband, despite his charm, does not possess. She is highly partisan, very divisive and unrelentingly ideological, as were TR, FDR and Reagan. She makes no bones about her agenda and she indicates that she is unrelentingly committed to fighting for it, only grudgingly accepting compromise when forced into a corner with no other option. Her style, her personality, her campaign all tell us what kind of President she aspires to be: a change agent of monumental proportions. Transformative presidents move mountains. They accomplish great victories and suffer great defeats. They are adored by their own party and literally loathed by the opposition. They accomplish enormous change and reshape the very landscape of the country. If one understands the history of our nation’s presidencies, it is quite clear what kind of President Hillary Clinton hopes to be. She is telling us with her every speech and her every deed.

Many political pundits are pushing the narrative that it is Barack Obama who is angling to be the transformer. These pundits apparently do not understand our political past and are not listening to what the candidates are telling us. These pundits are just hearing words: “hope” and “change” and following suit with their muddled, simplistic analyses. Their assertions are a canard. The fact is that Obama’s essence is that of the cooptor, the unity candidate, the great compromiser.

Likewise, these same nattering talking heads blithely assume that Hillary Clinton will necessarily govern in the fashion her husband did, because they are a married couple. It an inherently patriarchal assumption, and one fraught with empirical inconsistency, yet they make it anyway. It is the easy, surface, glib assumption to make.

Between the two candidates, if one reads history, it is easy to distinguish the one with the potential to be the earth moving transformer.

And it isn’t Barack Obama.

It is Senator Hillary Clinton.

The press and the New York and DC pundits have it completely wrong yet again.

It isn't the first time and it won't be the last.

[ugdude]

1. Sure she would /sarcasm

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=4346457&mesg_id=4346457

[THUNDER HANDS]

2. no president is going to be transformative without an agreeable congress

and Hillary almost assures us that we'd lose congress, if not in 2008 with her on the ticket, then in 2010 or 2012.

Obama can, and has, campaigned in red states where congressional candidates would never ask Clinton to set foot in.

Look at all the red state democrats who are supporting him.

Obama can build us a majority, a majority big enough to enact progressive legislation that Clinton could only dream of.


She may have her heart in the right place, but she doesn't have the ability to do what she wants to do. Obama has his heart in the right place, AND the ability to bring about change.

That's why I'm supporting him, and that's why almost everybody who gets paid to discuss politics agrees that he'd be more transformative then her.

[knowledgeispwr]

4. THANK YOU! No one is talking about the Congress!

All these presidential plans are all fine and good, without the Congress, they are going nowhere fast.

[splat]

6. 'Almost everybody who get paid to discuss politics' is a man btw

I don't see any evidence that Obama can do more than give stirring speeches. And make tough old pundits want to adopt him.

[THUNDER HANDS]

10. uh....and?

I don't see any evidence that Clinton can do more than give boring speeches and try to have it both ways when it comes to both her gender and her independence. She wants to say she'll be fiercly independent and definately in charge and cahnge the country in one breath, and then in the next breath she'll say she it takes a clinton to clean up after a Bush and use her experience in her husband's administration as part of her resume and take credit for any good things done during that time and disown any bad things done.

[splat]

15. She's the only candidate who knows how things work at that level firsthand

Before she even knew Bill, she was formidable in her own right.

[THUNDER HANDS]

17. experience is just one of many factors

but she's just as untested as anyone else. She's never had to run a campaign against a quality opponent before.

[splat]

23. Um... no woman has ever run a major campaign for president before

She's a pioneer, and she definitely has balls. I hear even women who don't like her, freepers, say they admire her guts.

[BeyondGeography]

19. Well stated; Obama has shown undeniable strength in rural, red state counties

Here's an article that backs it up:

Divided they stand

...Yet there is one major social divide, almost as important in its way as race itself, that Obama has already proved he can bridge, though the significance of his success has gone largely unnoticed. To see it clearly, you have to look closely at the results of the Nevada caucuses, which Obama narrowly lost to Clinton because he failed to carry Clark County, site of Nevada's only big metropolitan city, Las Vegas, with its enormous population of Hispanic voters. But in more rural counties he beat Clinton decisively - 63% to her 37% in Elko, 51% to 34% in Humboldt, 50% to 40% in Washoe (the missing percentages belong to John Edwards). I've been to those counties, their miles of lonely roads where you can drive for half an hour before encountering another vehicle, their scattered ranches and isolated towns, their seasonal creeks marked by lines of spindly cottonwood trees, the overwhelmingly Caucasian cast of their people. Out there in the mountains, sagebrush and high desert, Obama carried the day by far greater margins than his overall loss of the popular vote to Clinton across the state, and came out of the caucuses with one more delegate than she did.

Remember that in 2004 every American city with a population over 500,000 voted Democrat, and the Republicans won by taking the countryside and the outer suburbs. The blue state/red state division is better expressed in terms of the persistent conflicts between the big cities and their rural hinterlands, over land use, water rights and environmental, class and cultural issues. Red states are simply those where the country can outvote the urban centres, while in blue states the opposite is true. The perception that America has liberal coasts and a conservative interior merely reflects the fact that the coastal states are home to the largest metropolitan areas with the most electoral muscle. Last time around, for instance, Bush easily won the heartland state of Missouri, but was as crushingly defeated by Kerry in St Louis as he was in the cities of New York, Boston, San Francisco and Seattle.

So Obama's victory over Clinton in rural Nevada says something important about his ability as the apostle of national reconciliation. To win against Clinton in Elko County (black population: 0.8%), he had to convert not only white Democrats, but a large number of independents and people who had voted Republican until caucus day; a feat he pulled off with dazzling facility. Any Democrat nominee who can do that, deep in Republican country, is likely to gain the presidency; and Obama has proved that he can. Clinton, laden with the moral, cultural and political baggage of the 1990s, is likely to fare as badly in Elko County as Kerry did in 2004, when he collected just 20% of the vote.

The Democrats I know are currently pumped up by Obama's unexpectedly lavish win in South Carolina and his endorsement by Edward Kennedy, but that mood is unlikely to last. Though better for Obama than it was forecast to be, the South Carolina result, in which 80% of black voters supported him and 75% of whites supported a white candidate, is hard to interpret as a triumphant break with the old, bad "identity politics" of the past. Underneath the weekend euphoria is the pessimistic conviction that a candidate who really could win in November is going to lose out, by slow and painful degrees, punctuated with occasional Iowas and South Carolinas, to a candidate whose eventual nomination will give heart to Republicans across the land. Obama is like the physician who is felled by the very disease he was trying to cure: having promised to heal America's festering divisions, he is in danger of being swallowed by them, as they yawn within his own party, brown against black, black against white, female against male, Jew against gentile, not to mention old against young, and blue-collar workers against "highly educated professionals" (as the pollsters say). The basic demographics of the party are still in his disfavour, even though the demographics of the country at large suit him very well. And John Edwards' exit from the primaries seems unlikely to help Obama in his so far failing quest to enlist the votes of white, blue-collar males - a constituency that has until now been split between Clinton and Edwards.

When not preaching his exhilarating sermon of unity at rallies of the faithful, in interviews and town meetings, Obama has shown an intellectual's taste for ironic paradox - dangerous in a politician, as his remark about Reagan proved. On the evening of February 5, I fear he's going to need as much of that useful faculty as he can command, but I'd love to be proved wrong.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections08/comment/story/0...

[Kahuna]

24. You nailed it Magic Rat!!! It's about the down ticket races too...

And I fear that even if Hillary squeaks out a win for herself, she will lose us control of congress.

[knowledgeispwr]

3. How is she going to do all transforming with a narrow control of Congress?

How is "fierce partisanship" going to win over the necessary republican votes in both houses?

Will she just use signing statements to make up for what is lacking in the bills that reach her desk?

[DiamondJay]

5. i see many similaries with her and Reagan

Reagan, just like Hillary, was badly wanted by members of the opposing party to run for President. We thought Reagan was an idiot, too conservative and America was scared of him, and we would beat him in a landslide. And look what happened. He fucked it up for the Democrats for the last 27 years now. but more, they are both very ideological. I get the sense Hillary is much more so than Bill, and because she can be. She can get her agenda thru, she is known and respected in Washington more than her husband. She will be the next transformative leader, of course as a man I wish we could have a man do it, but what the hell.

[splat]

7. Reagan won his GE job when a focus group said they'd believe anything he said

That was when the California GOP approached him to be their spokesmodel.

[ErnestoG]

8. Hillary writers are getting very good at fiction.

At least they have a job, after she loses.

[splat]

11. Fiction? Weren't you saying she's a CEO?

[ErnestoG]

26. Nope. I said she hangs with them, and she does.

[splat]

31. The title of your post was 'She has CEO written all over her. The golden parachute kind.'

You're not saying she's hanging with people who write acronyms on her hand... no, you couldn't be.

Just what did you do at that paper, sell ads?

[Thrill]

9. Just curious how do you think it would play around the world

if Hillary was the President as opposed to Barack?

[splat]

12. Huge symbol for women, and she's well known; Barack is an unknown

If an American woman can be president, why can't a Saudi woman drive?

[THUNDER HANDS]

13. because they would get their heads cut off

or whatever they do in Saudi Arabia.

There have been female heads of states in other countries, you know.

[splat]

14. Have they cut their heads off yet?

Really? <giggle> I didn't know that.

Geesh.

[THUNDER HANDS]

18. well, lashings

or whatever they do.

[Thrill]

16. Well Personally

I think Obama would play very well around the world. I have family that stays in Spain. And people are excited by the idea he could be the President here. I'm not sure about Hillary, I think places like Iran, Russia, China etc........Would look at it as a sign of weakness. Simply because the way they treat women in those countries.

[splat]

20. The president of the United States is a woman, they'll have to deal with it

Iran would have to deal with the effect of such major change in the U.S. on its own women. This could be really interesting. They wouldn't think her weak when she rallied the women they thought were under their thumbs.

Obama would seem inexperienced to these canny leaders, as indeed he is, and I expect he would blunder quite a bit. That would seem weak.

[ErnestoG]

27. A woman president would be great. Just not Hillary.

[splat]

30. Maybe what you don't like about her is what it takes to break through

Pioneering is not for wimps.

[ruggerson]

36. They didn't look at it as a sign of weakness

when Margaret Thatcher was PM of the UK. Regardless, we don't choose Presidents based on overt sexist notions overseas.

[McCamy Taylor]

29. Bill Clinton is back! Hurray! The world really liked Clinton. There will be lots of

:applause:

The world is not going to have stars in its eyes just because we elect the first Black man. Most people in the world are not White. They are used to having non-Whites running their country, and they known that people of all ethnicities and races and religions can turn out all different ways.

On the other hand, the world was a much nicer place for a lot of people when Bill Clinton was around.

If U.S. campaigns could take foreign money, Hillary would be rolling in most of it, except all the oil money from Saudi Arabia would go to the GOP, and we would have billion plus dollar campaigns that would eliminate our economic woes.

[VotesForWomen]

35. what's your point? nt

[Dogmudgeon]

21. Here is what will be "transformational" ...

$100/bbl oil.

And $150/bbl oil.

And $200/bbl oil.

And mass hunger from ethanol production, and too-expensive fuel to run farm equipment.

And an abrupt rise in sea levels.

Both our candidates have the ability to address these concerns, but all the talk is of "transformation" and the IWR vote. And as soon as Obama pulls ahead, it will be about Antoin Rezko and Raila Odinga.

But ad revenue drives political seasons now.

--p!

[BootinUp]

22. K&R #5

Thanks for posting your opinion ruggerson. I agree with you.

[newmajority]

25. Over the last 28 years, the Bush/Clintons have "transformed" this country

but certainly not for the better. It's time to change.

[FrenchieCat]

28. Only in your mind!

:rofl:

[BringBigDogBack]

32. Holy shit.

You've lost it.

[avrdream]

33. Wow, did you write that?

Good stuff. Thanks for thinking.

[ruggerson]

37. thanks

:hi:

[VotesForWomen]

34. correct; obama and friends are dreamers, hillary is a doer. nt

[Name removed]

38. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[ruggerson]

39. Why are you spamming the board with this?

Welcome to DU

[applegrove]

40. Well said.