23
Aug
Killer with a heart of gold: How Wes Clark got ditched by Obama
Wesley Clark is held in almost idolatrous regard by a certain class of Democrats, who are now joining other classes — environmentalists, anti-militarists, secularists, civil libertarians and universal health care proponents among them — in a state of increasingly injured puzzlement over Barack Obama’s position on their issues.
The Clark class includes those Democrats who inwardly suspect that Republicans are right to attack their competence in the realm of national security, that liberalism may in fact represent a form of cowardice. They view Clark, who possesses both modestly liberal impulses and a resume that includes dropping 6,300 tons of bombs on Yugoslavia in 1999, as evidence that their own failures of nerve are just that — their own, and not their ideology’s. He is the spiritual love child of Barbara Streisand and sociopathic gunslinger John Wesley Hardin, a man who will save the whales with one breath and with the next, blow a hole in any bad guy who looks at us cross-eyed. He is living proof that liberals, or at least one liberal, can kick ass on a large scale at a professional level.
That makes him a great candidate, first for the presidency and now for the number two spot, in the eyes of his followers. Maybe in two years his currency will have devalued again and he’ll be a great candidate for the Senate; meanwhile, the class have noted and internalized Obama’s rejection of their candidate as a candidate.
That rejection is only heightened by the selection of Joe Biden as the actual vice presidential candidate. If Clark is the killer with a heart of gold, then Biden is the hooker with a heart of gold. He’s almost invariably loyal to those who give him lots of money, most notably the financial industry, and yet he has a soft spot for the people — consumers — that the people he’s screwing are paying him to screw over.
True to his word, Obama released the news about Biden to his mailing list, consisting of people who have given him money and people like me who just want to stay current on his rationalizations, before officially announcing it to the press. The announcement is short on details, such as why, O Lord?, but offers an opportunity to “let Joe know that you’re glad he’s part of our team,” and the assurance that Joe will get all of the notes.
There is of course no guarantee that he’ll read any of them, but certainly the campaign will pick and publicize the ones that best reflect the nature of Obama’s strongest supporters, who tend to behave as though they’ve just graduated from a cross between cheerleading and reeducation camps. The airbrushing of Biden will soon be underway, a task made easier by his magnificent hair and the remarkable revisionist capacity of those most loyal to Obama.
Fortunately, but by no means fortuitously, for the campaign, Biden’s warts are both well known and not especially disfiguring. Republicans will paint him as a dangerous liberal, but not more so than Obama because they’re still calling him the most liberal senator, based upon the silly National Journal ranking that managed to place the lone Socialist in Congress, Bernie Sanders, fourth on the liberality scale behind Obama, Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse (now there’s a good name for a veep), and Biden. Biden depressingly managed to vote the Bush administration position on legislation nearly half the time during the session, a feat that won’t bother Republicans or prevent them from attacking Biden’s liberality, but that should bother Democrats and won’t.
There’s the matter of Biden having borrowed speeches from actual leftist Neil Kinnock, an Old Labour bull from across the pond, during the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries, but I may be the only person in this country who both remembers the kerfluffle and continues to find it entertaining and politically significant. Beyond that, there’s the candidate’s apparently ungovernable impulse to occasionally shut down the filter between his brain and his mouth; we recommend either lithium or a 5-second delay on the mic.
Clark’s negatives seem to consist of his perfectly reasonable assessment that getting shot down, locked up and tortured doesn’t automatically mark one as presidential material; his early support for Hillary Clinton (my, these schoolgirl grudges!); whatever anyone can mill from the grist of his military career; and whatever the fallout of an ego big enough that it takes a step up from four stars to keep it happy.
The first item seems likeliest to be the explanation of the Obama cold shoulder. If so, it would fit with my perennial take on what’s the matter with Democrats, which is that they’re afraid to stand up for themselves. There can be not a single Obama staffer who doesn’t realize that McCain is a presidential candidate only because he got shot down, locked up and tortured, and who also doesn’t realize that the experience is no predictor of success in the White House. Yet they’re afraid not only to tell the truth themselves, but to even be seen with someone who tells the truth; never mind honoring him.
It’s in that territory where Clark partisans, no matter the genesis of their affections, find themselves stranded with the environmentalists disheartened by Obama’s embrace of domestic off-shore drilling, with the civil libertarians disenfranchised by Obama’s hollow promise to oppose the FISA legislation offering immunity to law-breaking telecoms along with greatly expanded executive branch powers, with secularists alarmed by Obama’s elastic approach to the separation of church and state, with anti-militarists now resigned to Obama’s boilerplate-neoliberal approach to foreign policy, with universal health care proponents who now expect a massive Obama-guided health-care cockup that will dwarf the Medicare prescription drug benefit mess. Where conscience and convenience collide, they all come off second best.
My friend Avedon Carol quotes the indisputably real smart Norman Solomon on the irony of progressives pro- and anti-Obama who mirror each other’s blind spots: “In an odd and ironic way, progressives who are unequivocal Obama boosters and unequivocal Obama bashers embrace similar concepts of limited alternatives in electoral work. They seem to rule out candidly critical support of a candidate — viewing such an option as either a betrayal of the candidate or a betrayal of principles. But supporting one candidate — clearly preferable to the Republican — should not require a lack of candor about the preferred candidate’s defects. And progressive interests are not advanced by claiming, against the evidence, that it doesn’t really matter which candidate wins.”
That last is a thought that Avedon has prefigured in a variety of ways during the months since it became apparent that Obama could win the primaries. I’ve become an increasingly adamant Obama opponent, but not because I think the winner in November is insignificant. It’s just that as someone who has travelled that archipelago of disappointment for longer than most, and watched it get more populated almost daily, I fully expect Obama to finish the job of discrediting the Democratic party among Democrats should he win. Conversely, I expect McCain to make anyone to the right of Leon Trotsky look really, really good.
So to my mind the question isn’t whether or not the outcome matters, but whether or not the ends justify the means. Does the less punitive Obama presidency justify flushing away what little credibility the Democrats possess? Is shocking the country hard to the left an outcome worth buying at the cost of one or two malevolent and bloody McCain terms?
In some important ways the outcome doesn’t matter to me: I’m destitute, and likely to stay that way, within a fairly narrow range, for quite some time; McCain can bankrupt the country without making me appreciably more poor or less sheltered. I do care, though, how many people he kills, an enterprise in which, we can safely bet, he’ll outperform Obama. How many lives is it reasonable to spend in the long-term pursuit of a leftist US government? How many lives would a leftist government refrain from taking?
I don’t know. Neither does Solomon. Unlike a great many people, I think the questions are worth asking.
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The logical error that you, I think, make is assuming that one individual defines the credibility of a party. If that were the case, Richard Nixon should have destroyed the Republican Party; in reality, they spent a mere six years in the wilderness and came back much stronger than they had been.
It’s true that popular presidents can strengthen a party. Both FDR and Reagan were figures that people rallied around. But people have low expectations about politicians.
And they should. Politicians have to satisfy–or at least not anger too greatly– a broad constituency, including the wealthy and powerful. Their choices are limited further by what the other branches of government will allow. What tends to get done are things that not many people care about– foreign wars, for example– or things that don’t cost any money. And, of course, specialty items that are purchased ala carte.
The real problem in America doesn’t have to do with the politicians. It has to do with the people. Very few people are really engaged in politics. Very few have a deep commitment to issues like poverty or the environment or peace. A tiny number understand history. Many of those who are engaged see politics purely as a means of getting what they want even at the expense of the nation. The low taxes crowd are famous for that, but left politics is also famous for threatening to withhold support unless certain demands are met. That only works if your party is strong.
And that is where we are at in this election. With divisions in the party, the Democrats are very likely to lose this election. Whether John McCain is good or not, the nation is facing very serious problems, including an economic meltdown as serious as anything following the Great Depression. One thing McCain is not is clever. He has shown no ability to deal with complexity.
As the saying goes, if you refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils, you get the greater evil. I think Obama is far better than just a lesser evil. Whether he is up to it or not, history would judge. But he deserves the chance.
August 24th, 2008 at 8:16 amIs shocking the country hard to the left an outcome worth buying at the cost of one or two malevolent and bloody McCain terms?
Two malevolent and bloody Bush terms haven’t shocked the country hard to the left. What on Earth makes you think one or two McCain terms would do so?
August 24th, 2008 at 8:47 amYou’re not the only one who remembers the Kinnock appropriation. Tammy Bruce, the actual shrill harridan that some imagine when they see & hear Sen. H. R. Clinton, was going on & on about it on her radio screech-a-thon yesterday. Not ever mentioning, of course, that once, when a recording device was on, Sen. Joe forgot to credit Kinnock, though he ordinarily did give proper attribution. We’ll doubtless be hearing more about this, but only half of the story.
August 24th, 2008 at 8:55 amKeith, the answer to your question is that most Americans haven’t been discomforted by Bush. McCain, picking up from where Bush leaves off, assuming Bush leaves off, will fix that. Nothing like a depression to bring the ol’ class war out into the open.
Charles, Congressional Democrats are already held in low regard, and having a Democratic president who will, according to me, fail miserably at addressing the most pressing problems facing the country will enable Republicans to bury Democrats for some considerable while. If Obama wins this year, 2012 will be seriously ugly for Democrats. If McCain wins this year, 2012 could be a banner year for me.
August 24th, 2008 at 10:14 amThis is the kind of thinking that got Weimar Germany into so much trouble, Weldon. “If just things get bad enough,” people thought, “they would have to get better.”
Alas, not so. The normal outcome for bad times is worse times. The US was unbelievably lucky to get an FDR rather than a Henry Ford… or worse. Totalitarianism is born in despair.
August 24th, 2008 at 11:13 amHey, Charles–thanks for stopping back by. Americans may have lucked out with FDR, but only in the degree to which he was prepared to jettison the then-current model. Absent a military coup, the two-thirds of Americans who were squeezed or crushed by the depression weren’t about to turn rightward from Hoover.
That’s not necessarily the case now, what with the lack of an actual left to conspire with events, but I think McCain could bring us to a tipping point where so many people lack health insurance, job security and shelter security, and the major political parties so absolutely lack credibility, that a leftist candidate could run for office and take it with a solid mandate.
I don’t think Weimar is an especially good analogy, at least not until the Venezuela-Paraguay Axis bring us to our knees and impose Draconian peace treaty conditions.
August 24th, 2008 at 11:42 amWhat happened in Weimar, Weldon, is that the left agreed to help Hitler come to power. This is not something they like to admit, and they certainly weren’t the primary cause of Hitler’s rise to power, but it’s a fact. I don’t have time to provide a proper link, but it’s so. I believe historian Gaetano Salvemini is where I first found confirmation of this.
The right is powerfully united by money and by fear of those they oppress. The center/left is always fragmented. Only under extraordinary circumstances does the center/left unite and take power.
And now I have to get back to my regular blogs. :-)
August 24th, 2008 at 9:51 pmIs shocking the country hard to the left an outcome worth buying at the cost of one or two malevolent and bloody McCain terms?
That’s what the Naderites were saying in 2000. Worked out really well for them, too. Well for Nader, anyway; for his voters, not so much.
How many people are you willing to see killed on that gamble over the next eight years? How many Americans?
August 25th, 2008 at 4:08 am“…Richard Nixon should have destroyed the Republican Party; in reality, they spent a mere six years in the wilderness and came back much stronger than they had been.”
Of COURSE Richard Nixon destroyed the Republican party. They may be in power now, but it has been completely corrupted. In fact it was that newly corrupted party that took power and has been busy consolidating it ever since. One need look no further than Cheney and Rumsfeld and the ownership of information outlets for the first clue. I would prefer to not participate in a similar destruction of the Democratic party.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:48 amBut Charles, that’s what Democrats are doing. There’s no need to wait for someone on the to-this-point-imaginary left to start cutting deals with the more or less fascist right, because Democrats have been doing so for going on eight years now. If that’s really what you’re worried about, well, it’s a done deal and Obama is lately at the forefront of it.
Kevin, McCain wants to blow people up in Iraq and Obama wants to blow people up in Afghanistan. The latter has more people available, so at least in theory Obama has an advantage, and one could make a strong argument that he’ll get more Americans killed than will McCain, disallowing for McCain being batshit crazy.
Regarding Nader, not everything is the same as things to which they are similar.
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