MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST
So, Hillary’s taken a few questions from the press now. But something more interesting than that has been happening over the past month: She has moved to the left or signaled her intention to do so on a pretty broad range of issues. All of you who want Elizabeth Warren in the race? Chill, people. She practically is.
Now, for all I know it might make the Clinton people cringe to see me write that, because it surely provides some degree of ammo for the right. But I reckon the right would have noticed this without my intervention, so my conscience is clear. But this is the emerging reality: If you are a 40-something Democrat who has voted over the years for Bill Clinton and Al Gore and John Kerry and Barack Obama, it’s looking like you are about to cast a vote next year for the most liberal Democratic nominee of your voting lifetime.
Start with the two positions she’s taken since the announcement video that have probably gotten the most attention. Her immigration position is considerably more aggressive than Obama’s, expanding his executive actions to allow more people to obtain work permits. Then, on prisons, she famously called for the end of the era of mass incarceration. The speech was filled with pleas to get low-level and nonviolent offenders out of prison and with sentences like “there is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes.”
There’s a lot more where that came from, usually announced, or mentioned, in those meetings with voters that the press following her so loathe. Here are the four most notable ones. These aren’t fully fleshed-out policy proposals, but presumably those will come:
• She told an audience in Keene, New Hampshire, that the country needs a free and universal pre-kindergarten program.
• At Tina Brown’s Women in the World summit in New York, she called for greatly expanded after-school and child-care programs. Also in Keene, she came out for closing the carried-interest loophole for hedge-fund managers, and the rhetoric was pretty populist, as she told furniture workers: “You are in the production of goods, and I want to do everything I can to support goods and real services and take a hard look at what is now being done in the trading world, which is just trading for the sake of trading. And it’s just wrong that a hedge fund manager pays a lower tax rate than a nurse or a trucker or an assembly worker here at Whitney Brothers.”
• And most important from my personal point of view, she’s been speaking out strongly in favor of paid family and medical leave, saying to a questioner at a Norwalk, Iowa, roundtable: “Well, boy, you are right on my wavelength because, look, we are the last developed country in the world that has no national paid leave for parenting, for illness. And what we know from the few states that have done it—California being most notable here—is it builds loyalty. If you really analyzed turnover in a lot of businesses where you have to retrain somebody—well, first you have to find them and then you have to retrain them—making your employees feel that you care about these milestones in their lives and you give them the chance to have a child, adopt a child, recover from a serious illness, take care of a really sick parent and get a period of time that’s paid just cements that relationship.”
These six positions—along with her support for a much higher minimum wage that’s indexed to inflation—almost by themselves make Clinton the most on-paper progressive candidate (and putative nominee) since who knows when. She is saying things that one never thought the Hillary Clinton of 10 or 20 years ago would have said.
It may be true that it’s less that she’s changed than that the times have, and she’s adapting. But hey, give her credit for adapting. Last summer, during her book tour, she said she didn’t think paid family leave was possible. Now, she’s talking like someone who isn’t merely describing a crappy reality but someone who sees that the point is to change it.
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| Chris Rock and Tom Lennon in What to Expect When You're Expecting Melissa Moseley/Associated Press |
There are some important positions she hasn’t taken yet. On the TPP trade agreement, most obviously, which is one on which I think she might go against the left, although I’m just guessing. I want to see what she has to say down the road about entitlements. Something tells me, the way she’s been talking so far, that there won’t be much emphasis on grand bargains and being responsible and raising the retirement age. I’ll be curious to see, for example, whether she endorses raising the payroll tax cap. I went to see West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin speak at Brookings the other day, and he said he’d gladly support raising the cap to help fix the entitlements’ insolvency problems. If Joe can say it, can Hillary?
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column urging liberals to suck it up and accept the fact that Hillary Clinton was the choice and there’s too much at stake and there’s nothing else to do so just get over it and support her. That column didn’t say much about her positions. It was just about the Supreme Court and what a nightmare Republican rule would be.
But at the rate she’s going, very little sucking it up will be required. She’s turning into a bona fide progressive. She may not go for the class-warfare rhetorical jugular with quite Warren’s gusto. But “the top 25 hedge-fund managers together make more money than all the kindergarten teachers in America,” which she said this week in Iowa, is close enough for me, and a lot closer than I thought she was going to be at this stage.
NY REVIEW OF BOOKS, GARRY WILLS
Believers in the good and true have for some time been urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president. They don’t, most of them, expect her to win—just to hold Hillary Clinton’s feet to the fire on populist issues she is beginning to endorse. Warren might even pry loose some of Wall Street’s cephalopod arms wrapped around Hillary. But Warren is already doing that, by her stellar work on the concrete issues that have long animated her—jobs, wages, bank excesses, mortgages, student loans. All the things she is doing in these areas pose a challenge to Hillary, which is why Hillary has been adopting some of her positions.
Besides, Bernie Sanders, having convinced himself that Warren is not going to run, has taken up the task of fire-bringing to Hillary’s feet. Good for him. His work at his day job in the Senate will be less missed than Warren’s. She is a massive presence there, perpetually bearing in on her colleagues—and the president. Sanders is more a gadfly making some of the livestock itchy. Furthermore, as a declared socialist he is so unlikely a candidate that there is little chance of his being infected by the attendant delirium of a campaign and starting to believe he can win. Of course he has to lie, as all candidates do, when he says he is “in it to win it.” Bill Buckley demonstrated long ago how dangerous is the truth for anyone running a symbolic campaign.
In 1965, when he was running for mayor of New York, Buckley was asked what he would do if he won, and he shot back: “Demand a recount.” That one comment got more attention than all the position papers he had labored over to show that the nascent Conservative Party of New York should be taken seriously. More immediately, the quip almost made his assistant campaign manager faint. He took Buckley aside and said, “You have people working night and day for your campaign. You can’t dismiss their efforts, making it harder for them to raise money or make voters pay attention.” Buckley never again said he could not win. He had learned the rules: pretend candidates have to pretend they are not pretending. It seems almost cruel to let down people whose belief in you is greater than your own.
Of course, once you start professing belief in yourself, it is easy to try sipping some of your own Kool-Aid. It saves psychic wear and tear just to go along with the campaign’s official line. I observed the perils of pretend campaigns in the case of Ralph Nader. In 1972, many were urging Nader to run for president—among them my friend Marc Raskin. Nader told Raskin he had worked hard to master the projects he was devoted to—car safety, consumer protection, the environment, and the PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) he was setting up state-by-state. If he ran for president, he would have to learn about many things he had not studied (who is the president of Uzbekistan?) and try pleasing a range of constituents with priorities very far from his own. He could do more by staying focused.
But ten years later, I ran into Nader at the New Hampshire primary and had lunch with him. When I quoted what he had told Raskin, he said that he now had wider interests and had convinced himself that the best way to draw attention to his concerns was to become a candidate for the highest office in the land. He ran half-heartedly in 1972, but in the nineties he changed his mind, readying himself to plunge ruinously into the 2000 race, where he came as a savior to prove that there was no real difference between Democrats and Republicans and we should reject them both for his one true position. This made him refuse to run only in states where he could not affect the outcome (advice given him by friends like his old fan Marc Raskin). He thus became one of the factors electing George Bush, giving us all the Iraq war, torture, and the Surveillance State. He has haunted subsequent presidential campaigns as the ghost of his former self, a social prophet dwindled into a mini-messiah, joining Gene McCarthy in the Harold Stassen brigade of perpetual candidates. That is how running for president can hollow you out.
I would never compare Elizabeth Warren to Nader. She is more profound and more human than Nader, the furious ascetic; and people prefer a genially learned preacher to a desert father. She is probably proof against the delusions that campaigns instill in their captives. But I would hate to see her wasting her valuable time on what I think of as visionitis, the concocting of airy nothingnesses to show you have a big message, a dream, that you want to share with Americans. In the 2012 campaign journalists called on candidates to “go big, not small,” which meant getting higher and emptier. In the 1968 presidential race, the first I covered as a journalist, Richard Nixon was told that he needed to enunciate a vision, and someone on his still-small staff (I think it must have been Pat Buchanan) came up with one—that under him the country will have “the lift of a driving dream.” Nixon shakily kept rehearsing that line in the New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries, pairing it with a feeble Harold Lloyd right-uppercut gesture. When George H.W. Bush was campaigning he made fun of “the vision thing,” but then he took the one written out for him, reading “Message: I care.” His son said the same thing—that is, nothing—with more syllables, when he promised a “compassionate conservatism.”
Warren has better things to do than fool with such ventures into lyrical nonsense. She has become a force by sticking with what she knows better than anyone—the obscenity of banks’ high profits and workers’ low wages. She understands the concerns of ordinary people with jobs, health care, and student loans. While Republican governors are trying to learn who is the president of Uzbekistan, she has better things to do.
May 12, 2015, 12:24 p.m.
Believers in the good and true have for some time been urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president. They don’t, most of them, expect her to win—just to hold Hillary Clinton’s feet to the fire on populist issues she is beginning to endorse. Warren might even pry loose some of Wall Street’s cephalopod arms wrapped around Hillary. But Warren is already doing that, by her stellar work on the concrete issues that have long animated her—jobs, wages, bank excesses, mortgages, student loans. All the things she is doing in these areas pose a challenge to Hillary, which is why Hillary has been adopting some of her positions.
Besides, Bernie Sanders, having convinced himself that Warren is not going to run, has taken up the task of fire-bringing to Hillary’s feet. Good for him. His work at his day job in the Senate will be less missed than Warren’s. She is a massive presence there, perpetually bearing in on her colleagues—and the president. Sanders is more a gadfly making some of the livestock itchy. Furthermore, as a declared socialist he is so unlikely a candidate that there is little chance of his being infected by the attendant delirium of a campaign and starting to believe he can win. Of course he has to lie, as all candidates do, when he says he is “in it to win it.” Bill Buckley demonstrated long ago how dangerous is the truth for anyone running a symbolic campaign.
In 1965, when he was running for mayor of New York, Buckley was asked what he would do if he won, and he shot back: “Demand a recount.” That one comment got more attention than all the position papers he had labored over to show that the nascent Conservative Party of New York should be taken seriously. More immediately, the quip almost made his assistant campaign manager faint. He took Buckley aside and said, “You have people working night and day for your campaign. You can’t dismiss their efforts, making it harder for them to raise money or make voters pay attention.” Buckley never again said he could not win. He had learned the rules: pretend candidates have to pretend they are not pretending. It seems almost cruel to let down people whose belief in you is greater than your own.
Of course, once you start professing belief in yourself, it is easy to try sipping some of your own Kool-Aid. It saves psychic wear and tear just to go along with the campaign’s official line. I observed the perils of pretend campaigns in the case of Ralph Nader. In 1972, many were urging Nader to run for president—among them my friend Marc Raskin. Nader told Raskin he had worked hard to master the projects he was devoted to—car safety, consumer protection, the environment, and the PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) he was setting up state-by-state. If he ran for president, he would have to learn about many things he had not studied (who is the president of Uzbekistan?) and try pleasing a range of constituents with priorities very far from his own. He could do more by staying focused.
But ten years later, I ran into Nader at the New Hampshire primary and had lunch with him. When I quoted what he had told Raskin, he said that he now had wider interests and had convinced himself that the best way to draw attention to his concerns was to become a candidate for the highest office in the land. He ran half-heartedly in 1972, but in the nineties he changed his mind, readying himself to plunge ruinously into the 2000 race, where he came as a savior to prove that there was no real difference between Democrats and Republicans and we should reject them both for his one true position. This made him refuse to run only in states where he could not affect the outcome (advice given him by friends like his old fan Marc Raskin). He thus became one of the factors electing George Bush, giving us all the Iraq war, torture, and the Surveillance State. He has haunted subsequent presidential campaigns as the ghost of his former self, a social prophet dwindled into a mini-messiah, joining Gene McCarthy in the Harold Stassen brigade of perpetual candidates. That is how running for president can hollow you out.
I would never compare Elizabeth Warren to Nader. She is more profound and more human than Nader, the furious ascetic; and people prefer a genially learned preacher to a desert father. She is probably proof against the delusions that campaigns instill in their captives. But I would hate to see her wasting her valuable time on what I think of as visionitis, the concocting of airy nothingnesses to show you have a big message, a dream, that you want to share with Americans. In the 2012 campaign journalists called on candidates to “go big, not small,” which meant getting higher and emptier. In the 1968 presidential race, the first I covered as a journalist, Richard Nixon was told that he needed to enunciate a vision, and someone on his still-small staff (I think it must have been Pat Buchanan) came up with one—that under him the country will have “the lift of a driving dream.” Nixon shakily kept rehearsing that line in the New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries, pairing it with a feeble Harold Lloyd right-uppercut gesture. When George H.W. Bush was campaigning he made fun of “the vision thing,” but then he took the one written out for him, reading “Message: I care.” His son said the same thing—that is, nothing—with more syllables, when he promised a “compassionate conservatism.”
Warren has better things to do than fool with such ventures into lyrical nonsense. She has become a force by sticking with what she knows better than anyone—the obscenity of banks’ high profits and workers’ low wages. She understands the concerns of ordinary people with jobs, health care, and student loans. While Republican governors are trying to learn who is the president of Uzbekistan, she has better things to do.
May 12, 2015, 12:24 p.m.