With the Republican race for the final presidential nominee more or less settled for John McCain, the US is turning their attention to the final race still in question: the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
This particular contest is not only fascinating because of its historic nature (the racial/gender identity of the most likely candidate for President), but it is also fascinating because of all the fuss being made over what amounts to very little. As I mentioned before, primary races are unique in that they are typically elections between very similar candidates. Of course there are some nuanced differences between the policies that Obama and Hillary are touting, but these differences are minor compared to the differences in policies between the Democrats and the Republicans, and they are probably minor compared to what policies will actually make it through the legislative process.
And, the thing is that both campaigns know this. Instead of touting policy differences (which, in my opinion, is usually a sign of a weak candidacy — think back to Howard Dean and Ron Paul and John Edwards, candidates who campaigned almost exclusively on their policy differences), both candidates have focused on what are essentially character attacks. While Hillary trumpets her experience and her connection with the very popular President Bill Clinton, Obama touts his “message of change.”
The ironic thing, however, is that a closer examination of both of their records suggests that, with a few exceptions, most of their campaign talk is bunk:
- Hillary Clinton is no more experienced in any meaningful way than Obama
- Claims that Obama will “change” everything are vastly overstated.
- If elected, Hillary Clinton’s administration will probably be very different from Bill Clinton’s.
Hillary Clinton and her “Experience”
This is a very bizarre “reason to vote Hillary” in my opinion, because I just don’t see anything solid behind it. As this Slate article puts it,
“Obama served eight years in the Illinois state Senate and is halfway through his first term in the U.S. Senate. Clinton is about to begin her eighth year in the U.S. Senate. Going by years spent as an elective official, Obama’s 11 years exceeds Clinton’s 7“.
Of course, the legitimate response to the previous point about her not having as much experience as an elected official is to say that experience is more about the number of years served as an elected official. But even this fails to stand to criticism. What experience has she had? No, sleeping with Bill Clinton doesn’t count. The Slate article continues with this telling tidbit,
“During her husband’s two terms, Hillary Clinton did not hold a security clearance, did not attend meetings of the National Security Council, and was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. During trips to Bosnia and Kosovo, she acted as a spokeswoman rather than as a negotiator.”
But even if we grant the premise that Hillary has vast tracts of experience behind her, we can still question the quality of her experience and her ability to lead. Very brilliant (and also liberal) economist at UC Berkeley Brad Delong has this to say about Hillary’s “experience in the White House”:
“I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.
So when members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When members of the economic team told her that the CBO would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with the CBO head had already fixed that. When long-time staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised…”
But let’s go out on a limb even more and grant that Hillary has vast tracts of good experience behind her; that still pales in comparison to the experience that John McCain has, in the Senate, as a soldier (and even a P.O.W), as a consensus-builder. This is not an endorsement of McCain (I have my own problems with his campaign) so much as sheer bewilderment at why Hillary would be willing to run on “experience” when it’s so clear she would lose in a contest of experience with the Republican frontrunner!
Do I believe that Hillary has the “experience” to lead the country? I think that question is a red herring. The President of the United States is not some lone cowboy facing down legions of problems (that sounds more like some other President that is currently facing his final year in office), he/she is an individual who works with advisors, with Congress, with the private sector, and with other countries to devise and implement solutions. That means it is not a question of if the President has the experience so much as a question of if the President has the skills to correctly identify key problems, to build consensus among the affected parties, and to carefully balance the tradeoffs that need to be made. Does Hillary have the experience to do that? I’m sure she, Obama, and McCain all do.
Obama and “Change”
There is no denying that Obama is an excellent speaker. His speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention still strikes me as the best speech I’ve ever seen delivered by a politician. Yet, Hillary Clinton and her supporters have lashed back that all Obama offers is words and no real change. Is this true?
Frankly, to me, this almost goes without saying. In a democratic system where people are neither willing nor able to grapple with complexity and are grossly uninformed about politics, all politicians have good reason to make promises which are not entirely honest.
The Obama campaign’s response to these charges has been a nonsensical statement that Obama’s detractors are simply being hostile to a “message of hope.” This is as inspiring and uplifting as it is completely devoid of any real substance. Obama’s campaign has an obligation to prove that he truly represents something different.
So, does Obama prove that he has something different? Yes and no. On the one hand, the vast majority of his policy prescriptions are fundamentally the same as those of Hillary’s. There is no brilliant change embodied by his proposals for tax cuts for the middle class or on college tuition or green energy. His campaign has not made a move to openly support gay marriage or to ban corn-based biofuels. As Robert Samuelson points out, despite Obama’s statements about the need to move beyond “Red states vs. Blue states”, his toeing of the party line suggests this broad consensus he’s attempting to build won’t be as broad as his supporters hope, as Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson notes:
“[Obama] has run on the vague promise of ‘change,’ but on issue after issue — immigration, the economy, global warming — he has offered boilerplate policies that evade the underlying causes of the stalemates. These issues remain contentious because they involve real conflicts or differences of opinion … He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation’s major problems when, so far, he isn’t.”
To be fair, while Obama’s end goals and policy prescriptions do not differ all that much from Hillary’s, Obama still represents an interesting change in policymaking philosophy as guided by the academic pragmatists he has signed on to his campaign (e.g., David Cutler, Austan Goolsbee, Jeffrey Liebman, and David Romer). While the final tax policy may be similar to Hillary’s, Obama has demonstrated interest in building an “iPod government” — something simple and elegant and easy-to-understand. Hillary, however, backed by a base of traditional Democratic advisors, seems content to use traditional policy tools with a expansive system of tax cut and subsidy levers to achieve the same goals.
So, does Obama represent change? Yes, but potentially on a level which is not especially relevant to most Americans.
Hill Clinton?
What has been driving a great deal of Hillary’s support is her association with the very popular Clinton administration in the mid-90s (at least that’s what pollsters had to say about the broad support for Hillary from Latinos). This is, again, a big puzzle for me, as a quick look at Hillary’s policy stances will show that on a wide range of issues, her administration will be quite different from that of her husband’s. If the reason people are voting for her is some nostalgia for the mid-90s (and come on, let’s face it, most of us do), they should think twice before voting on that alone.
- We are not in the midst of a tech bubble. If anything, we are in the midst of a mortgage bubble quickly deflating. There is no reason to believe that we can quickly and painlessly re-create the growth of the mid-90s regardless of who the President is.
- The foreign policy objectives are completely different. With no core national security threats, no strong demand for military action against any clear enemies in the 90s, the Clinton administration was able to focus almost entirely on gung-ho humanitarian and alliance building exercises. With the US military today stretched out over multiple strategic arenas and both Hillary and Obama committed to facing a new, hard-to-pin-down super-national threat (i.e., Al Qaeda is not based in one country), it is hard to imagine that the foreign policy of Bill Clinton which Democrats seem to love so much will return in the near-future.
- Hillary is anti-trade, Bill wasn’t. Do you know those NAFTA and WTO agreements that the Democrats seem to hate so much and blame for all of America’s problems? Guess who passed them? If you said Bill Clinton, you’d be right. And if you were to say that most economists think free trade is a good thing and probably one of the big reasons for American prosperity in the 90s, you’d get extra credit — and Hillary would probably fail.
- Bill Clinton was an easier grader in law school, while Hillary would kill you – okay, not a really serious point here, but this blog post comparing their teaching styles was just too cool for school
Long story short: Hillary is NOT Bill Clinton. There is no reason to expect her administration to end up anything like Bill’s. This is not a reason to vote for or against her, but people who are voting for her solely because they expect to go back to the mid-90s are going to be sorely disappointed.