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I can’t say when a Democratic Presidential candidate’s campaign speech has disappointed and infuriated me more than Hillary Clinton’s September 2 speech in New Hampshire. The media billed it as Clinton’s “new stump speech” and her answer to Barack Obama, as if the media has already made this a race between the two of them. As usual the media focused on tactics as if they were analyzing a football game (horse race is the usual analogy) while ignoring the content. It’s rather like describing the frosting and never tasting the cake.
Yet it is the content of Clinton’s speech that is significant, for it reveals a desire to walk the same path that has resulted in two straight Democratic presidential defeats. In fact her much-heralded four goals sound suspiciously like those of John Kerry.
For what is supposed to have been a major campaign speech I found it strange that I was unable to find a complete text of the speech anywhere on the Internet. Clinton’s own site did not even have it. Some I am reduced to using reports from the media, something I normally detest doing when there should be primary sources available.
According to the New York Times, here is what Clinton said:
We need a president who can restore America’s leadership in the world, rebuild our middle class, reform our government, and reclaim the future for our children.
Here are the chapter headings for Kerry’s infamous Plan for America which can now be had on Amazon.com for a penny–which gives you some idea of the Plan’s worth:
LAUNCHING AND LEADING A NEW ERA OF ALLIANCES
MODERNIZING THE MILITARY
CHARTING THE COURSE TO ENERGY INDEPENDENCE
RESTORING FISCAL DISCIPLINE TO WASHINGTON
CREATING NEW JOBS IN AMERICA
PROVIDING HEALTH CARE FOR EVERY CHILD
MANAGING SKYROCKETING HEALTH CARE COSTS
PROVIDING EVERY AMERICAN A WORLD-CLASS EDUCATION AND THE OPPORTUNITY TO ATTEND COLLEGE
The similarities are so striking it makes you wonder.
The fatuousness of Clinton’s goals leads me to do something I had not planned to do until at least next year–criticize a Democratic candidate. If Clinton runs on these “goals” she won’t get elected. Kerry didn’t and neither will she. To show you how fatuous Clinton’s goals really are, I direct you to the official Hillary Clinton campaign blog. There poster Crystal Patterson found the “big goals” so unmemorable that she could not even get them right! Here is Patterson’s take on Clinton’s goals:
Over the two-day swing, Hillary made clear that she has the strength and experience to deliver the change America needs, and outlined her four big goals: Restoring our leadership in the world; rebuilding our middle class economy for the new global era; reclaiming the future for our children; and bringing back the values of integrity, fairness and tolerance in America.
So if her own campaign people can’t even get the goals right because they are so nebulous, what does Clinton expect the rest of the country to do?
To make matters worse Clinton, in a departure from her usual cautious style, labeled these as “big goals.” They are neither big nor goals. To planners and to most of the rest of us, goals must be quantifiable and measurable, otherwise how else do you know you have achieved them? Isn’t that what we have been asking from George W. Bush about Iraq? John Kennedy’s statement about putting an American on the moon is usually cited as the classic example of a goal. He stated exactly what he planned to do, when it would be accomplished and how.
Clinton’s “goals” are frankly an insult to the intelligence of American voters. This is the kind of “talking down” to people that has caused the Democrats trouble in the past. Reading the four “big goals” can you conceive of anyone who would be against them? Of course not. In fact here is the 2004 Republican Platform!:
Our plans focus on ensuring that America remains safe, terrorists are defeated, and democracy flourishes in the world … on expanding opportunities for ownership and investment … on making tax relief permanent and ensuring greater energy independence … on increasing the affordability and accessibility of health care … on promoting works of compassion and strengthening our greatest values … on preparing students for success in life by bringing the benefits of education reform to high schools … and on helping workers adjust to a changing economy by offering flexible training options that meet their individual needs.
The Clinton goals are so nebulous, so cliche-ridden that my guess is that the average junior high student could write a better speech.
Without elaborating on her goals other than adding a few more cliches, Clinton essentially made them meaningless and goals that are meaningless signal a candidate who has no principles at all. This is triangulation, the New Democrats and everything that took the Party I have supported all my life down the road to ruin. Triangulation may have served her husband well when the opposition was New Gingrich, who delighted in telegraphing every punch and then throwing it anyway, but those days are long gone.
We have already endured two terms of fatuous leadership; we don’t need another four. For several years now I have been fighting to restore the core value of Liberal America. The fight has been a lonely and seemingly hopeless one, but I have fought it because that core value also is the heart of American democracy. It has distinguished this democratic society from all the others in the world. That core value is so basic it can be reduced to a soundbite: the foundation of American democracy is that the function of government is to keep the playing field level. That’s it.
You don’t have to be a policy wonk to know that the playing field has tilted under the Republican Counterrevolution that began with Ronald Reagan. I’ve been writing about the tilted playing field for over two years if you count the book, but the Democratic Party, which for most of the twentieth century served as the keeper of that faith, does not seem to get it.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Consult the now three-old-report of the APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy. Here’s what they said in the middle of the 2004 campaign when neither the press nor the Democratic Party listened:
Our country’s ideals of equal citizenship and responsive government may be under growing threat in an era of persistent and rising inequalities. Disparities of income, wealth, and access to opportunity are growing more sharply in the United States than in many other nations, and gaps between races and ethnic groups persist. Progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled, and in some arenas reversed.
If you want to listen to a real stump speech, listen to Harry Truman with his back to the wall in 1948, deciding not to move to the middle of the road but to go down fighting for the beliefs he and Franklin Roosevelt had given their lives to. LISTEN to the speech, then every time you hear another Hillary-like fatuousness yell. “We want Harry not Kerry!” Here are some choice phrases from the transcript that say more in a few paragraphs than Clinton’s entire speech:
I have told the people that there is just one big issue in this campaign and that’s the people against the special interests.
The Republicans stand for special interests, and they always have.
The Democratic Party, which I now head, stands for the people–and always has stood for the people.
The Democrats have believed always that the welfare of the whole people should come first, and that means that the farmers, labor, small businessmen, and everybody else in the country should have a fair share of the prosperity that goes around.
Note the phrase “the whole people,”–that is ALL of us, poor, middle class, people of color, immigrants and natives. There is nothing in here of the Kerry-Clinton focus on the so-called middle class. To focus on the middle class and ignore the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the Indigenous people on reservations where as many as one third are unemployed, the people in the inner cities who face bullets and schools where the toilets don’t work and all the other Americans in need is not merely a travesty it is a direct slap in the faces of Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt and all the other Democrats who have fought for what Roosevelt termed “the Forgotten Man.”
If Democrats want a health care plan–just revive Truman’s. If they want to know how to deal with the GOP’s tax cut bs, just listen to what Truman has to say about it. It’s all there. You don’t have to rewrite an agenda.
Unfortunately, 2008 is shaping up much like deja vu all over again. The folks who call the shots believe Dubya and the GOP’s screw-ups have dealt the Republican’s Presidential hopefuls a fatal blow. Like 2004, the Democratic bigwigs seem to feel the way to win is just to play it conservative like a football team facing what they think is a patsy opponent. They didn’t watch the Michigan game last weekend.
The problem is the GOP candidate will not be an insider. People forget the GOP has become almost as angry with Dubya as the rest of the country. None of the current candidates plus those waiting in the wings like Newt Gingrich have any ties to George W. Bush.
Clinton’s shallowness may play well with the centrist establishment but she will be eaten alive if she tries to pull that off in a face-off with the GOP. Frankly, I had expected better of Hillary Clinton. There is no doubt she is experienced, bright and caring. Yet her New Hampshire speech was a serious mistake. Perhaps as the campaign progresses she will find her voice. I do believe somewhere in that tightly wound shell lies a real contender.
Meanwhile I wait for someone who will actually speak out for the core value of Liberal America and present a plan that will level the playing field for EVERYONE!
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