Beyond the 90s

While in more or less agreement with the general thrust of Paul and Erik’s evaluations of Hillary Clinton as a candidate, I would say perhaps that they were being a little harsh. Clinton winning statewide election in a deep blue state by 12 and 36 points is hardly indicative of a great political talent, but it’s also something Martha Coakley failed to do not once but twice. She has huge flaws as a candidate that reveal themselves frequently, but she has her strengths. She debates well, the one thing she does better than Obama. And while I agree that there are ways in which Sanders matches up better with Trump, her 2000 Senate campaign showed one thing she’s good at is remaining calm while giving sexist opponents enough rope to hang themselves, and in terms of sexist bluster Trump makes Lazio look like a piker. And while it’s not really relevant to the general, I’d also note that as Marco Rubio and Jeb! Bush will tell you, locking up a ton of endorsements and scaring most of the viable candidates out of the race isn’t something that just happens. I would say that rather than Peyton Manning as substandard Super Bowl winning QBs go she’s more like the 2007 version of Eli Manning — far from my first choice to go into an important game with, and someone who too many times a year throws a terrible pick into triple coverage and ambles over to the bench looking like a paste-eating goober, but not without his virtues and capable of winning if things break right. And, whether the nominee is Clinton or Sanders, things certainly are breaking right for the nominee thanks to the infinite non-wisdom of the Republican primary electorate.

Still, on a visceral level I understand the impulse to see Clinton’s string of gaffes as being even more politically damaging than they are. They’re not just random mistakes. Bringing up Henry Kissinger’s positive evaluation sua sponte, raking in huge speaking fees from unsavory corporate interests while knowing you’re running for president, inventing an alternate history where the Reagans were admirable rather than unimaginably horrible on AIDS — they all reflect her near-complete immersion in a particular bubble of establishment non-wisdom. The world in which you boast about Henry Kissinger’s support is an all-too-familiar one, one in which Joe Scarborough and Mark Halperin are serious political analysts, Fred Hiatt is running a bang-up op-ed page, the world described by and reflected by This Town. And, of course, the massive substantive and political blunders that sank her 2008 campaign — voting to give an overconfident, inept president the authority to invade a country that posed no security threat to the United States, and putting her campaign in the hands on a transparent fraud and incompetent who was highly respected in the Beltway for his conservative pandering and being part of a winning presidential campaign it would have been nearly impossible to lose — also reflect this. Ideologically, she’s moving with the party and his running much more like Obama than her husband, but her instincts always seem aligned with the defensive crouch Democrats were in the 90s, the time in which “liberal” was a dirty word and Democrats felt the need to prove they were adult enough to govern by appealing to the wrong sort of crowd. Sanders has never been part of this bubble, and it really is highly appealing. It will be nice when the 90s in this sense are finally over.