No Earthly Ideas.

 

As Obama is still settling into his second term, many have already turned to speculate at who will be running in 2016. Speculation over a GOP candidate range from Chris Christie to Paul Ryan and beyond, whereas prognostications regarding a Democratic candidate seem to be preoccupied with Hillary Clinton. In the background you should be able to sense the lowering of expectations, a foreclosure on the very possibility of a manifested opposition. The realm of the possible narrows further, the field down closes to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for the pollsters. Of course, it remains to be seen who is even considering running. At this point all potential candidates will shirk from announcing such a bid for fear of putting a hat in the ring too early. That's just sensible conduct for any politico. So it should surprise no one that when Bill Clinton was asked whether or not Hillary would run he responded by saying he had "no earthly idea". With that non-answer Bill demonstrates the same glibness that would win over the audience at the Democratic National Convention.

 

By 2016 BO, as the reactionaries call him, will be even more withered and white-haired than today, a far cry from the inflated Kennedy-cum-Christ figure of 2008. That figure will be an even more distant memory in four years than it is today. Not a modicum of the Messiah left, instead a mauled continuity pervades. Given the level of hopeful projections onto Obama, disillusionment was inevitable. The lowering of expectations is not unusual to Democratic politics, very often it lays the way for the politics of reaction. The disappointments of Jimmy Carter led to the Reaganites gaining office through a mediocre mandate to roll back the intrusive government. Similarly the Clinton era left the Democrats without a legacy worth defending when the Bushites were ushered into office under disgraceful circumstances. It's strangely appropriate that we find Clinton being hailed as a future candidate at this point. It's as though the despair in the awake of Obama's second term are already foreseeable. And that's true because there's so much to cry about already.

In February Democratic pollsters found Hillary Clinton leads the top GOP 2016 contenders in red states such as Alaska, Texas, Kentucky, Louisiana and Georgia. Even though Clinton had only been replaced with Kerry for a week or two at this point and the prospects of her nomination still seem way-out to those concerned by dynastic formations in apparently democratic societies. It looks like Obama is the future and Romney is the past just going by the demographic change in birth-rates. So the white populism that Clinton reached for in '08 definitely won't cut it in '16. It's plausible that she could appeal to the Latina vote simply as she's a Democrat and on the moral issue of abortion. By contrast, it's difficult to spot a spokesperson of American conservatism capable of overcoming the GOP's contradictions. The Republicans will probably have to tone down the anti-immigrant rhetoric to gain a greater slice of the hispanic vote. Then in March Reason estimated there is around 22% of support for Clinton. It seems more likely than it did a couple of months ago.

 

What might we expect from a future Clinton White House? The eminent feminist Bonnie Greer deems the Obama administration a second Clinton administration. That's one answer to the question. So if Hillary Clinton wins office it will be the third Clinton White House. With all of this in mind, we can judge the woman by her record at the State Department, as well as the period in which she was First Lady. We can set our expectations pretty low if these joint-records are to be taken as a fair representation of Clinton. And we have no reason to think otherwise. So we may gauge a few things from the Clinton record at the White House, which contains a few serious hiccups:
 

• On the campaign trail Bill Clinton was faced with mounting interest in his extramarital relationship with Gennifer Flowers. The candidate opted to see to it that a lobotomised black man was put to death.
• The first Clinton administration armed the Turkish government as it waged a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kurds and leaving 50,000 people dead.
• Having inherited the aftermath of the First Gulf War the Clinton White House imposed economic sanctions against Iraq and starved over 500,000 people to death.
• President Clinton bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan under the pretence that it was a chemical weapons factory. In fact it's likely that the President knew full well and was looking for a neat distraction with Monica Lewinsky in the news reels.
• During this period Hillary Clinton advocated military intervention in Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999). She is no dove in other words.

There is plenty more to go into, though we should probably scrutinise the Clinton record at the State Department. In office with former rival Obama the Clinton record does not fair much better. The Obama administration reacted with timidity to the Arab Awakening that threatened to unseat all kinds of bulwarks to democracy. Clinton was not a voice of dissent and described Mubarak as 'family' only to see Hosni given the boot by his generals. Clinton oversaw the NATO intervention in Libya, which rapidly escalated from a UN sanctioned no-fly zone to a full-blown and illegal bombing campaign on the side of the rebels. Though at least the campaign was on the side of a rebellion. You can't even say that about the swarms of drones Clinton sent over Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Impressed yet? And this is meant to be the best of American liberalism, its finest choice for the State Department in 2008 and its President in 2016.

 

All the while the Clintons have been more than complicit, totally supportive actually, of the decline of the American welfare state. Then there's the stomping out of the social democratic wing of the Democrats. They pioneered the method of triangulation, which goes as follows: loot the supportable planks from the Republican platform, bag the corporate funding that follows it; "test the water" with polling, all while keep the liberal Left on board with the lesser evil logic. Obama and the Clintons represent the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. Do we really need another right-wing in American politics? Aren't the Republicans right-wing enough for both parties? Expect nothing less from the people who thought that the problem in America, after 12 years of Republican government, is that the Democratic Party is too left-wing. Not only that but the American under-class have to be brought back in line, it's not warfare but welfare to be slashed and burned.

The 'Masterful' Bill Clinton.

On the Perils of Clintonism.

Since Bill Clinton made his rather glib speech at the Democratic National Convention the BBC has been running a three-part series of documentaries called The Clintons. It's subject is Bill Clinton, post-Reaganite America and the Clinton era of the rise of Third Way politics in the 1990s. Clinton was the first of the business Democrats who reconstructed the Democrats as a right-wing force of reaction and not of reform. The moderation of Dukakis and Mondale was jettisoned, after 12 years of Reaganism nothing short of a sharply conservative redirection of the Democratic Party. It had been in the works for a very long time, as the Kennedys and Carter had played a major role in the degeneration of New Deal liberalism into an electoral husk. The Kennedy liberals oversaw the expansion of the national security state as part of the launch of a criminal war in Indochina, while they took a knife to the top rate of tax for the wealthiest Americans.

After the creature of Nixon had been chased out of the White House it was Carter who initiated the first deregulatory measures on industry while he anointed Paul Volcker - who would soon become the hammer with which the poor would be battered. With that in mind Jimmy Carter was the last concession made to the grass-roots radicals of the 60s, before him there was George McGovern and since him there have been none. To get a feel of Bill Clinton's soul one only has to look to the 1992 campaign trail. The first sex scandal to preempt the Lewinsky scandal erupted with Gennifer Flowers coming forward to put it to the press that she had had a 12-year relationship with Clinton. The immediate response from the Clinton campaign was to act as though Clinton had anything to do with Flowers and only admitted to sleeping with her once several years later. The first objective was to change the subject for the press as it looked as though the story wouldn't just go away.

This is what The Clintons didn't include in its first episode. Clinton saw to it that Ricky Ray Rector was put to death in 1992. At the time, Rector was "seriously mentally impaired", to say the least as he had survived shooting himself in the head after he had shot a police officer in the back. But the court rejected the claim of grave mental impairment and gave Rector the death penalty. Clinton could have pardoned Rector, but instead he flew over to Arkansas to exploit Rector's execution to appear "tough on crime". On the night of his execution, Rector saved a slice of pecan pie to eat later, not understanding his death would come first. The sad irony is that Ricky told his incompetent lawyer that he would like to vote for Clinton. It took 45 minutes for the state's murderers to find a vein in Rector's arm into which they would shoot sodium thiopentol. Meanwhile Bill Clinton had dinner with Mary Steenburgen. And as for Clinton's way with women he has been accused of rape on more than one occasion.

As Christopher Hitchens saw, at the time, Bill Clinton demonstrated a willingness to pander to the racist subconscious of the electorate. On top of this, it was a presentation of ruthless harshness on Clinton's part and the ability to keep liberals on his side even when he stoops to this abysmal low. No one should've been surprised that Clinton would be willing then to bomb the only aspirin factory in Sudan to deflect media attention away from the notoriously semen-stained dress. Once again, the people who have to pay the price for Clinton's sexual conduct are not white and do not have the same privileges of a man of his economic and political status. Hitchens was right to conclude that the public and private face of Bill Clinton are one in the same, that the infidelities of this President was in tune with his most appalling political decrees. Not just Sudan, we shouldn't lose sight of Iraq where the Clintonites used sanctions to starve hundreds of thousands of people. Nor should we forget about the Turkish crimes committed against the Kurds with US arms supplied by Clinton.

The primary legacy of Clinton is the approach he pioneered - that of triangulation specifically. Basically, it amounted firstly to the looting of supportable planks from the Republican platform in order to bag the corporate funding that follows it. Secondly comes a series of psephological measures to "test the water" such as polling to see when it would be best to adopt the proposals. All the while the liberal Left are to be kept on board with the "lesser evil" allure of the Democratic platform. The extent to which the Clinton White House was able to coopt the Left into its base no matter what it did was quite incredible. Not just Ricky Ray Rectar and the aspirin factory in Sudan. Think Waco, where the FBI incinerated 82 people with the broad approval of the liberal Left. This is what convinced a network of lunatic right-wingers that something had to be done. In fact it ultimately led to the Oklahoma City bombing, its perpetrator had come out of the emergent militia movement and its hardline anti-political purism. Still, at least it wasn't for a blowjob.

Really Existing Democracy.

The incumbent President has come out of the Democratic National Convention smiling only to be confronted with upheaval in the Middle East. Yet the approval rating of the candidates, the atmospheric desperation and mediocre speeches of the Conventions are more or less irrelevant. As Mark Hanna would remind us "There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can't remember the second." Follow the money and you'll find the winner. It was Bush who outspent his opponents in 2000 and 2004, he didn't even need to win over enough votes - the cash was enough. When Obama got in there was a gap of over $400 million between his campaign and McCain's. Incidentally the Obama campaign won the award for the best marketing campaign of 2008. What's the situation in 2012? It was predicted that campaign contributions would exceed $1 billion. So far Romney had raised over $193 million whereas Obama had raised almost $350 million.

What does all of this signify? Well it's important to take from this that the United States is not really a democracy in the strict sense. Instead it might be better understood as a polyarchy. Polyarchy can be understood as a system in which a multiplicity of political parties - who represent a coterie of powerful interests - compete with one another to govern the society. The political class faces a dual constituency, in which the needs and wants of the poor come second to the needs and wants of the rich. The convergence of interests plays a huge role in political concessions and development in general. But we can debate the extent to which interests overlap and produce a particular outcome. After all, there is an opposition within capitalist relations between the interests of workers and bosses. The political processes may even be seen as purely managerial in this sense, the working-class has to be managed in such a way as to slot into a mandate.

It seems more or less compatible with Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics, where the political parties represent blocs of investors. The standard split in American politics can be drawn between high-tech capital intensive and low-tech labour intensive business, the latter being more nationally oriented than the former. The Republican Party responds to the interests of a specific slice of American capital, which seeks to drive down labour costs through anti-union measures and insulate itself from foreign competition. By contrast the Democratic Party was capable of the New Deal because it represented a portion of capital which could tolerate unionisation that would leave it unscathed. It's worth noting that the major support for Franklin Roosevelt came out of banking and oil. So the New Deal reforms could scathe the interests of industrialists to improve the living standards of workers because it did little to harm the interests of finance and energy.

There are said to be ten lobbyists for every member of Congress looking to shoot down any attempt at significant financial regulation. That's not all. The situation has worsened since then and the Obama campaign accepted over $745 million in 2008 and the campaign team went on to win an award for the best marketing campaign of 2008. Since then the Supreme Court has removed all obstacles to even greater corporate influence on elections and has legalised the unrestricted flow of corporate dough into the campaign war-chests. We shouldn't forget that the Bush administration set a major precedent in US history. Bush did not need to win over the electorate to attain office, the immense support from Big Business was enough and the US Supreme Court made sure the interests of Corporate America were not opposed in the election. At least there may be cause for celebration in the fact that the contributions have not yet reached $1 billion as predicted.