Nicholas Kristof, who's been away on leave, is back at the Times today and writing about Hillary Clinton and the issue of a candidate's experience. It's a good column. And there is opportunity for comments at Kristof's blog. The feedback was particularly interesting. Some excerpts:
"Nathan Nahm" posts and interesting, long comment about Bill Clinton's role in the campaign:
Someone should raise an issue of whether the manner in which Bill Clinton is campaigning for Hillary Clinton is ethically, if not legally, appropriate of a former President. For what Bill Clinton has recently been doing on the campaign trail, especially the super-aggressive and abrasive manner in which he has been campaigning for Hillary Clinton, has been very undignified, to say the least, and has degraded the office of the U.S. President. Presidents, even after retirement, are accorded a very special status and role in the national and international affairs and are given special respect and courtesy by the entire nation. Using that special role and status to actively campaign for a particular individual, as opposed to merely expressing his general opinion or preference, seems to be wrong and seems to amount to a gross violation of etiquette and propriety, and possibly worse. Actually, Bill Clinton is not only acting like one of the low-level abusive political operatives do, which is clearly unbecoming of a former U.S. President but he is also acting almost as if he were running for another term of Presidency through his wife. Hillary, too, is claiming “experience,” as if she had also been a President (or, “co-President”), when Bill was. If we remember that Bill is not legally allowed to run for another term of Presidency, we can see that what Bill and Hillary are doing together is almost a violation of the law that prohibits more than two four-year terms of Presidency by one person. In other words, if Hillary was really a co-President when Bill Clinton served as President, then, at least in the spirit of the law, she should not be allowed to run for President because she had already served two four-year terms as co-President. If Bill Clinton implies that he will stand by Hillary in a special way, as if he were a co-President, if she is elected, then, he is violating the law himself. Of course, there is no law that states that one cannot run for the office of President if his or her spouse has served two four-year terms. But my point is that the relationship of husband and wife is so special that the law should, at least in spirit, be applied to a couple together. Or, at the least, a former President should give enough deference to the office of US President which he had previously occupied, and should not abuse that very special status and respect for political gains of any particular individual, let alone his family member, with the insinuation that she is his political alter ego.
"Kane" has this to say about Hillary Clinton's experience:
Hillary Clinton keeps talking about her 35 years of experience. “I am offering 35 years of experience making change,” she said in New Hampshire. “I’m not just running on a promise of change, I’m running on 35 years of change.” And she repeatedly mentioned the 35 years again in this week’s debate in Las Vegas.
Well, Senator Clinton, I’m confused. I’ve done the math. You’re 60, which means that 35 years ago you were 25. And I Googled your name, looking for all the change you were making as a 25 year old and, frankly, I’m not finding much. You were going to Yale Law School at the time — which I’m sure was a personally transformative experience, but it’s hardly the kind of change that should count on one’s Presidential Training Experience resume, is it?
"David Keppel" cites Senator Clinton's record on nuclear policy:
In Chicago this fall, Senator Obama called for negotiations leading to the global abolition of nuclear weapons. This position is no longer confined to idealists: it was endorsed by Kissinger, Nunn, Shultz, and Perry in a Wall Street Journal article last January. It recognizes that President Bush’s selective policy (menacing Iran while ignoring India, Pakistan, and Israel, and ourselves seeking new, “usable” nuclear weapons) simply lacks the political legitimacy to succeed. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty requires existing nuclear powers to work toward disarmament.
Senator Clinton’s nuclear policy is strikingly different from Obama’s — and is much more like Bush’s. In the November-December issue of Foreign Affairs, she calls for maintaining U.S. nuclear forces “to deter others from trying to match our arsenal.” This is a call for U.S. nuclear hegemony very much in keeping with the Bush administration’s and is strikingly different from even the Cold War, when we recognized (at least fitfully) that mutual deterrence required only parity with the Soviet Union. It will lead to a renewed arms race with Russia and China and undermine any grand bargain between nuclear haves and have-nots. Thus a Clinton administration would face the same dilemma we have now of accepting proliferation or launching “preventive” wars.
PW comments about party machinery and faux feminism:
The Clintons -- once the fresh air the Democratic party needed -- have become members of the powerful and blindered leadership of the party.
Many lifelong Democrats have drifted away from the party as it moved to the right and towards a commitment to corporatism. The grinding noise of party machinery and the clink of coin is very perceptible in the background of every Clinton event. What many of us want is a sense that we are part of the political process, that our candidates respond to us. What Hillary Clinton responds to is polls and what drives her is not only perfectly understandable personal ambition but the cold ambition of an old Democratic leadership which has been out of power for eight years (or more, if one counts the debacle of 1994).
The apologists for Clinton (because she is a woman, for the most part) are apparently not willing to see that she is not acting as an inspired and independent leader but as the front for an ambitious group of party hacks. That's a hard truth for many women to take and must be really hard for Hillary herself. Hillary Clinton does not have a strong record of achieving real power and moral leadership on her own in spite of huge educational opportunities and a political front seat for decades. There's no reason why she couldn't. But she hasn't.
