Hillary Clinton Writes About Her "Hard Choices"

MICHIKO KAKUTANI, N.Y. TIMES

The rollout of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new book, “Hard Choices,” as a prelude to a possible 2016 run for the White House, has had all the subtlety of a military operation ramping up to full speed: the leak of the Benghazi chapter to Politico late last month (presumably to get talk about that hot-button topic out of the way early), the cover story in the latest issue of People magazine, the wall-to-wall lineup of television interviews this week, a grueling cross-country book tour.

The book itself, however, turns out to be a subtle, finely calibrated work that provides a portrait of the former secretary of state and former first lady as a heavy-duty policy wonk. Compared with her 2003 memoir, “Living History” — which tended to lapse into glib, stump-speechlike pronouncements and reactive efforts to blame assorted enemies for her and her husband’s travails — “Hard Choices” is a statesmanlike document intended to attest to Mrs. Clinton’s wide-ranging experience on national security and on foreign policy. There is little news in the book. And unlike former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates’s rawly candid memoir “Duty,” this volume is very much the work of someone who is keeping all her political options open — and who would like to be known not only for mastering the art of diplomacy, but also for having the policy chops to become chooser-in-chief.

“Hard Choices,” like Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, does not evince a grand, overarching foreign policy vision, as Henry A. Kissinger’s 1994 book “Diplomacy” did. Rather, Mrs. Clinton displays a pragmatic, case-by-case modus operandi. Some critics have argued that she played it safe as secretary of state, that she had no marquee achievements like a Middle East peace accord. And her new book (written with an assist from what she calls her “book team”) suggests that Mrs. Clinton’s main legacy lies in reorienting American foreign policy in a globalized, tech-savvy 21st century, and in helping restore the country’s image abroad in the wake of the Iraq war and the unilateralism of President George W. Bush’s administration.

One of the few things this book shares with “Living History” is its emphasis on Mrs. Clinton as someone capable of growth and change: an individual who says she learns from past mistakes like her 2002 vote to authorize military action in Iraq. (She “got it wrong,” she writes of that vote. “Plain and simple.”) “Hard Choices” seems meant to serve several purposes at once: to document Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state; to put her dysfunctional 2008 presidential campaign in the rearview mirror; to supplant memories of her tumultuous days as first lady (Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky) with images of her negotiating with leaders on the world stage; and to lift her above the partisan mudslinging of Washington.

The only chapter in which Mrs. Clinton sounds defensive or defiant is the one on the 2012 attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya — the subject of continuing investigations by House Republicans, bent on asserting that President Obama and Mrs. Clinton covered up what they knew about the causes of the attack. “I will not be a part of a political slugfest on the backs of dead Americans,” she writes.

 

....Though she does not possess the genial explanatory gifts of her husband (showcased in his 2011 book about the economy, “Back to Work”), she provides the lay reader — and potential voter — with succinct and often shrewd appraisals of the complex web of political, economic and historical forces in play around the world, and the difficulties American leaders face in balancing strategic concerns with “core values.” The tone is calm and measured, with occasional humorous asides, like describing an offer by Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian leader, to take Bill Clinton along on a polar-bear tagging expedition.

More positive developments like the diplomatic and economic isolation of Iran are described in considerable detail, while more controversial subjects like drone warfare and the data collection programs of the National Security Agency get only cursory, talking-points treatment. Beltway readers will not learn much new here about matters like the Obama administration’s handling of the war in Afghanistan or its counterterrorism policies.

 

For readers who are less policy-oriented, there are personal tidbits strewn lightly throughout, like small chocolate Easter eggs. Mrs. Clinton tells us that she would fight jet lag by sometimes digging “the fingernails of one hand into the palm of the other”; that she kept the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hide-out secret from her husband (“They told me not to tell anyone, so I didn’t tell anyone”); that President Obama once called her aside before an international meeting for what she thought was a sensitive consultation, only to hear him whisper in her ear, “You’ve got something in your teeth.”

Mrs. Clinton’s views are perceived as often more hawkish than Mr. Obama’s, and in these pages, she walks a delicate line between being his loyal lieutenant and articulating her own beliefs. She takes a hard line on Mr. Putin, writing that...“strength and resolve were the only language” that the Russian leader understood. Of her unsuccessful argument within the administration for arming and training moderate Syrian rebels, she writes: “No one likes to lose a debate, including me. But this was the President’s call and I respected his deliberations and decision.”

 

Addressing much-chronicled tensions between the State Department and White House advisers, Mrs. Clinton enumerates some of her differences with them in the book — including her counsel of caution to Mr. Obama in pressing President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to step aside in the face of mounting street protests in Cairo. She also writes that it was painful to see her old friend Richard Holbrooke, the veteran diplomat she had chosen to handle the Afghanistan-Pakistan portfolio, “marginalized and undercut” by younger White House aides who disliked his flamboyant, old-school style.

ROBERT GATES DELIBERATES ON WAR



Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images        

N.Y. TIMES

Robert M. Gates gives us a forthright, impassioned, sometimes conflicted account of his four and a half years as defense secretary in his fascinating new memoir “Duty,” a book that is highly revealing about decision making in both the Obama and Bush White Houses.

Mr. Gates — who has won plaudits from both Republicans and Democrats over the years for his pragmatic, common-sense approach to his job — has a doctorate in Russian and Soviet history, was director of central intelligence in the early ’90s, and worked under eight presidents. His writing is informed not only by a keen sense of historical context, but also by a longtime Washington veteran’s understanding of how the levers of government work or fail to work.

Unlike many careful Washington memoirists, Mr. Gates speaks his mind on a host of issues, freely expressing his dismay with the micro-managerial zeal of White House national security aides and his unfettered fury at a dysfunctional Congress. The majority of it, he says, is “uncivil, incompetent in fulfilling basic constitutional responsibilities,” “hypocritical, egotistical” and eager to put “self (and re-election) before country.”

 

... while his overall portraits of Mr. Obama (“the most deliberative president I worked for”) and George W. Bush (he “had strong convictions about certain issues, such as Iraq, and trying to persuade him otherwise was a fool’s errand”) are familiar enough, they are fleshed out with myriad, telling glimpses of the two men at work. Mr. Gates — whose nickname in the Obama White House was Yoda — also gives us his shrewd take on a range of foreign policy matters, an understanding of his mission to reform the incoherent spending and procurement policies of the Pentagon, and a tactile sense of what it was like to be defense secretary during two wars. (For security reasons, he traveled to Iraq inside “a sort of large silver Airstream trailer” placed in the hold of a military cargo plane, which, he says, felt “a lot like being FedExed halfway around the world.”)

Headlines have already been made by passages in this book relating to Mr. Obama’s stewardship of the war in Afghanistan. Mr. Gates writes that while he “never doubted Obama’s support for the troops,” he did question his support for their mission there. From early on, he writes, there was suspicion in the White House that the president was “getting the ‘bum’s rush’ from senior military officers” over the question of a troop increase in Afghanistan, and that that suspicion grew over time.

 

During a heated March 2011 meeting, Mr. Gates says, the president suggested he was possibly “being gamed” by the military. Listening to this, Mr. Gates says he thought, “The president doesn’t trust his commander,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, “can’t stand” the Afghan president Hamid Karzai, “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

 

Such widely quoted bits of the book — now being dissected on TV — give the impression that as a whole it is less nuanced and measured than it actually is. In fact, Mr. Gates seems less intent on settling scores here than in trying candidly to lay out his feelings about his tenure at the Pentagon and his ambivalent, sometimes contradictory thoughts about the people he worked with.

 

He writes that he found President Obama’s methodical approach to problem solving “refreshing and reassuring,” and commends his ability to make tough decisions “regardless of the domestic political consequences.” But he also talks about coming close to resigning, feeling “deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation — from the top down — of the uncertainties and inherent unpredictability of war.” In a note to himself, he wrote: “They all seem to think it’s a science.”

 

Mr. Gates says he found it dismaying to hear Hillary Rodham Clinton talk about her opposition to the 2007 surge in Iraq in terms of domestic politics and the Iowa primary. But in another passage, he praises her as “smart, idealistic but pragmatic, tough minded, indefatigable, funny, a very valuable colleague, and a superb representative of the United States all over the world.”

 

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. does not fare as well. Mr. Gates says Mr. Biden is “impossible not to like” though, in his opinion, Mr. Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

   

Clockwise from top left, Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister of Israel; King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia; Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff; and Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. Credit Clockwise from top left: Nicholas Kamm/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Pool photo by Brendan Smialowski; Charles Dharapak/Associated Press; Jim Bourg/Reuters

 

Mr. Obama’s national security aides like Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes are singled out for some of Mr. Gates’s most stinging criticism. He suggests that such advisers were often “out of their depth” in foreign policy and military matters, and blurred the chain of command by circumventing more senior officials. In this respect, this book echoes the journalist James Mann’s 2012 book “The Obamians,” which argued that the president leaned heavily on an inner circle of young aides who had been with him through his 2008 campaign, while keeping more experienced hands at a distance.

 

The Obama White House, Mr. Gates writes, was “by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost.” He adds that its “controlling nature” and “its determination to take credit for every good thing that happened while giving none to the people in the cabinet departments — in the trenches — who had actually done the work, offended Hillary Clinton as much as it did me.”

 

Mr. Gates points out continuities in national security policies between Mr. Bush’s second term and Mr. Obama’s first. And he notes other similarities between the two presidents: both “had the worst of both worlds on the Hill: they were neither particularly liked nor feared” and did little to reach out to individual members of Congress; nor did either “work much at establishing close personal relationships with other world leaders.” In short, both seemed “very aloof with respect to two constituencies important to their success in foreign affairs.”

 

Regarding the Bush administration, the most compelling parts of this book concern Iran and Mr. Gates’s worries about “the influence of the Israelis and the Saudis” on the White House, particularly the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and “their shared desire to have problems like Iran ‘taken care of’ while Bush was still president.” Mr. Gates repeatedly warned of the dangers of “looking for another war” when America was already at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. At one point, he says, he was so worried that Mr. Bush might be persuaded by Vice President Dick Cheney and Mr. Olmert “to act or enable the Israelis to act” (that is, to take military action to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon) that he made an intense private call to Mr. Bush in which he argued “we must not make our vital interests in the entire Middle East, the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia hostage to another nation’s decisions — no matter how close an ally.”

 

Mr. Gates says little more about Mr. Cheney’s influence in the White House, observing that by 2007 the vice president “was the outlier on the team” with President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley “and me in broad agreement on virtually all important issues.” He is also curiously elliptical when it comes to his predecessor at the Pentagon, Donald H. Rumsfeld, whom he replaced in December 2006. Instead, he talks in more general terms about the chaotic war in Iraq he inherited, writing that he was “stunned by what I saw as amazing bungling after the initial military success.” He also confides that Mr. Bush told him in January 2008 that “he wished he’d made the change in secretary of defense ‘a couple of years earlier.’ It was the only thing I ever heard him say even indirectly critical of Rumsfeld.”

 

Critics of the Bush administration, he writes, fail to understand the sense of fear and urgency that Sept. 11 left on the White House. He adds, though, that “the key question for me was why” several years later, with improved defenses in place, “there was not a top-to-bottom review of policies and authorities with an eye to culling out those that were most at odds with our traditions, culture, and history, such as renditions and ‘enhanced interrogations.’ ” He says that in the summer of 2008, he and Ms. Rice argued “for an aggressive effort to get legislation that would permit us to close” Guantánamo Bay prison but did not prevail.

 

Mr. Gates is at his most emotional — and moving — in talking about his love for the men and women who serve in the military. “Signing the deployment orders, visiting hospitals, writing the condolence letters and attending the funerals at Arlington all were taking a growing emotional toll on me,” he writes near the end of this plain-spoken memoir. “Even thinking about the troops, I would lose my composure with increasing frequency. I realized I was beginning to regard protecting them — avoiding their sacrifice — as my highest priority. And I knew that this loss of objectivity meant it was time to leave.”

 

In retrospect, Mr. Gates says, his time as secretary of defense reinforced his “belief that in recent decades, American presidents, confronted with a tough problem abroad, have too often been too quick to reach for a gun — to use military force” even though “wars are a lot easier to get into than out of.”

ELIZABETH WARREN: THE 'GREAT WHITE HOPE' OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY?

CHRIS CILLIZZA WASHINGTON POST

Quick, name someone who would have a realistic chance of beating out Hillary Clinton for the 2016 presidential nomination. Martin O’Malley? Nope. Joe Biden? Maybe but probably not. Howard Dean. No way. There’s only answer to that question that makes even a little sense. And that answer is Elizabeth Warren.

The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber hits this nail directly on the head in his cover story this week entitled “Hillary’s Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies with Elizabeth Warren“. The entire piece is worth a read but this paragraph stood out to us:

In addition to being strongly identified with the party’s populist wing, any candidate who challenged Clinton would need [two] key assets. The candidate would almost certainly ....have to amass huge piles of money with relatively little effort. Above all, she would have to awaken in Democratic voters an almost evangelical passion. As it happens, there is precisely such a person. Her name is Elizabeth Warren.

Scheiber’s broader argument is this: The Democratic party is facing a looming debate between those friendly and those hostile to Wall Street and its interests come 2016. Clinton is on the friendly side. Warren isn’t. And all of the grassroots energy in the Democratic party — as judged by activists and what animates them — sits on Warren’s side.
Need evidence? Check out the $42 million Warren raised in her 2012 Senate victory over Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown. Or, as Scheiber notes, the massive response her fundraising emails get for the national party — trailing only asks from President Obama and, yes, Hillary Clinton.  Or watch Warren’s speech and, more importantly, the reaction to her speech, at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

 Clinton represents the head of the Democratic party. But Warren is its heart. We’ve touched on this idea in this space before, noting that in many ways Warren is the liberal populist that liberals thought they were getting when they elected President Obama in 2008. The New York Times’ Rebecca Traister wrote about this phenomenon, describing Warren and Obama this way:

Embracing Warren as the next ‘one’ is, in part, a way of getting over Obama; she provides an optimistic distraction from the fact that under our current president, too little has changed, for reasons having to do both with the limitations of the political system and the limitations of the man. She makes people forget that estimations of him were too overheated, trust in his powers too fervid.

But, there’s more to Warren — and her differences from Obama and Clinton — than simply her willingness to stake out unapologetically liberal positions. It’s the way she does it, a sort of quiet confrontation — yes, we know that seems contradictory — that has created an image of her as one of the only people (in either party) willing to speak truth to the political and financial powers-that-be. It’s that willingness to confront that, more than anything else, has turned Warren into an Internet sensation – her You Tube channel is littered with speeches that have been viewed more than 1 million times, she is regularly part of highly-trafficked items on Reddit.com — and given her a base of political power that lies outside the Senate chamber and, more importantly, beyond the long reach of the Clintons.
All of the above comes with two big caveats: 1) Warren and her people insist she has no interest in running for president and she has already signed a letter supporting Clinton for president and 2) She is untested on the national stage and/or against an opponent as able as Clinton. Warren, for all of the passion she creates in others, is not the Dean-like populist firebrand (at least not yet) on the campaign trail. She often comes across as wonky rather than “wow”.  She’s heavily focused on policy, not politics.

And yet, a path does exist for Warren.  As Clinton learned in 2008, a candidate that appeals to voters’ hearts can beat a candidate that appeals to their heads.  And Clinton, for all of her built-in advantages in a 2016 race, will be hard pressed to ever be the heart candidate of the party base. Elizabeth Warren would be that candidate the minute she signals her interest in running. That fact should scare Clinton and her political team.

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GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST

I doubt Warren is running — her statement to the Boston Globe yesterday seemed pretty definitive. However, Warren’s speech to the Roosevelt Institute is definitely worth noting as a touchstone in a larger Democratic Party argument that may well unfold right through 2016. In it, she calls for a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall (by the way, do you remember which Democratic president presided over the repeal of that law? He’s a Clinton, too) and frames the big story this way:

I spent most of my career studying the growing economic pressures on middle class families — families that worked hard and played by the rules but still can’t get ahead. And I’ve also studied the financial services industry and how it has developed over time. [...]
We should not accept a financial system that allows the biggest banks to emerge from a crisis in record-setting shape while working Americans continue to struggle.  And we should not accept a regulatory system that is so besieged by lobbyists for the big banks that it takes years to deliver rules and then the rules that are delivered are often watered-down and ineffective.
What we need is a system that puts an end to the boom and bust cycle.  A system that recognizes we don’t grow this country from the financial sector; we grow this country from the middle class.
Powerful interests will fight to hang on to every benefit and subsidy they now enjoy.  Even after exploiting consumers, larding their books with excessive risk, and making bad bets that brought down the economy and forced taxpayer bailouts, the big Wall Street banks are not chastened. They have fought to delay and hamstring the implementation of financial reform, and they will continue to fight every inch of the way. That’s the battlefield.  That’s what we’re up against. 

The key to the speech is that it amounts to a sweeping indictment of the whole economic system that unapologetically deprives the financial sector for all the credit for economic growth. In this, Warren goes farther than many Democrats, who support progressive taxation and nominal Wall Street regulation, but “still fundamentally believe the economy functions best with a large, powerful, highly complex financial sector,” as Scheiber puts it.
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...Warren is talking about a much deeper level of reform designed to address inequalities resulting from the upward transfer of “a giant share of the money flowing through the system,” reform that gets to the core question of “what kind of economy we want for all of our citizens.”

...as I understand Scheiber’s argument, his primary point is that Warren’s popularity and appeal reveal the presence of larger political forces within the Democratic Party that Clinton should take very seriously, whether or not Warren runs. Warren’s speech today is a good marker for understanding the potential for tensions among divisions among Democrats on these issues, which look very real.

THE SMOULDERING SOUTHERN RIGHT WING

Jim DeMint

LLOYD GREEN DAILY BEAST

Welcome to the latest installment in America’s long-simmering, semi-civil, civil war. Just because General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House doesn’t mean that old grievances have gone away.

These days, the Republican Party is the party of the South; the party of Lincoln is now the party of Ted Cruz and Jim DeMint; and the DeMint-backed Senate Conservatives Fund is bellowing that the “Republicans are the problem right now.” The only thing missing from this tableau is South Carolina’s long-gone Preston Brooks.

Preston Brooks?  Yes, Preston Brooks. Back in the day—the day being May 1856, he beat Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner over the head with a cane in retaliation for a speech Sumner delivered a few weeks earlier, in which Sumner had advocated the abolition of slavery and dissed a Brooks relative.

Still, the reality is that the skirmishes of the last four-plus years are less about race per se, and more about diversity tinged by the brush-strokes of need, and the political demands of the polychromatic poor. As Jonathan Chait acknowledged, “In a few weeks, the United States government, like those of France, or Australia, or Israel, will begin to regard health insurance as something to be handed out to one and all, however poor, lazy, or otherwise undeserving each recipient may be.”    

Through this lens, the fights over Obamacare, or even immigration and guns are not simply about the transfer of wealth, government mandates, amnesty, or the text of the Second Amendment. Rather, it is a culture war, a battle over the social fabric itself, in an America which grows ever less monochromatic....

Against this sulfurous backdrop, Democrats and Republicans alike feel compelled to man the ramparts for their core constituencies. In the Congress, a Confederate-like hostility to government has found a home in the House of Representatives, where a majority of the majority (translation – a minority) blocks consideration of a clean continuing resolution that would allow government to muddle along, and the stock market to heave a sigh of relief.

For those who worry about these developments—like the high end of the GOP’s donor base—Republican-induced market drops are unwelcome, and could lead to problems for the party down the road. Obama’s tax hikes are despised, but what’s a tax hike compared to a default-triggered portfolio wipe-out?

As a reminder, wealthier voters actually voted Democratic in 2008—a first—as a rebuke to the failings of George W. Bush’s presidency....But beyond the fight over the budget and the debt, the Republican Party appears ill-equipped to meet the challenges posed by America’s changing demographics. It is not just about minorities. The gender gap looms large at the voting booth, as well as among donors. In 2012, women donated 44 cents of every campaign dollar received by the Obama campaign, but less than 30 cents raked in by the Romneyites. 

Also, there is the issue of geography and the cultural center. Right now, Ted Cruz is the leading contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, and is followed by Kentucky’s Rand Paul. New Jersey’s Chris Christie trails in third. Cruz’s filibuster delighted many conservatives, and powered him to the top of the GOP’s scrum. But beyond that, his appeal and traction appear limited to the party faithful.

In contrast, Hillary Clinton is part of the cultural center. She was once the first lady of Arkansas, and in 2008 she ran well among white working-class voters. Equally as important, she is closer to her party’s center of gravity—unlike Mitt Romney or Governor Christie, who appear to be outliers within their own party, each in his own way. In other words, Clinton would be an easy sell to the Democratic base.

 

Hillary 2016 Brings Back Boomer Clinton Rage

MICHAEL TOMASKY DAILY BEAST

I’m quite looking forward to Hillary Clinton being president of the United States. I think she will probably run, I think she will probably win, [May the Fates allow it--Esco]  and I think she’ll be at least a good and maybe a great president. What I’m not particularly looking forward to is the process by which she’ll have to get there. Just in the past few days here, Maureen Dowd and Richard Cohen have laid before us in the form of two recent and silly columns little reminders of the prejudice against Clinton within a certain slice of the liberal chattering class, a prejudice that will swell predictably as she passes the various posts that stand between her and the nomination and, finally, election. Fortunately, these chatterers are less and less relevant every election. Clinton should welcome their animus. It can only help her.

I have observed many strange things in my years of tilling these fields, but surely nothing stranger than the way the arbiters of conventional wisdom in America have viewed the Clintons. It’s a deep and weird Baby Boomer psychodrama that I can summarize as follows: when the Clintons first hit the national scene, they were doing so at the same time that strivers of their generation were starting to displace the old graybeards in the news business. Tim Russert took over Meet the Press in 1991. Dowd got her column in 1995. The ’60s generation was taking over. Things were going to be different. Here was a cohort, after all, that grew up thinking that it could, and would, change the world. And now one of their own was president! We would witness the dawn of a new era of authenticity, to use a big ’60s word, and the Clintons would lead it.

Soon enough, though, the Boomer generation turned out to be no more authentic than any other—indeed quite less authentic, or at least less admirable, than the greatest generation, whom Tom Brokaw limned between hard covers the same year the world learned the name Monica Lewinsky. Though the Boomer journalists began to turn on the Clintons before the Lewinsky scandal, that really sealed it. Obviously, there were good reasons for any human being to consider what Bill Clinton did there to be unacceptable. But there was a self-regarding quality to many Boomer journalists’ scribblings (and on-air musings—the cable nets were taking off around this time) about the whole mess, as if the Clintons had somehow done this to them. Chris Matthews—oh, if you could have heard him in those days going on and on and on about the Clintons, and about Al Gore too (Matthews has even said that he voted for George W. Bush in 2000).

I served my time inside the walls of this abattoir as Hillary first sought her New York Senate seat in 1999 and 2000, a race I covered closely. My God, the hatred of Hillary one heard then! Especially among white Boomer women. At one event in early 2000, I ran into the journalist Jim Traub. We were chatting about this matter, and he said he’d spoken to a shrink friend of his who was aghast at the number of women who were plopping themselves down on his couch and—well, as Jim said to me: “Can you imagine, these women spending $165 an hour to talk about Hillary?”

That was then. Ever since, Clinton has of course served a very successful stint as a senator from New York, successful enough that when she sought reelection in 2006, the Republicans had no one of importance to run against her. (I remember well their blood vows to make sure she was a one-termer.) She then became the secretary of State, and an excellent one, forging major diplomatic breakthroughs with Russia (since rescinded by Putin, not her fault) and other triumphs like the Libya coalition. In between, she ran a not-very-good presidential campaign, it is true. But there’s very little room to doubt the proposition that someone who has been both a senator and a secretary of State, and has to boot lived in the White House for eight years and seen daily what it’s like to have that job, is amply prepared to be the president, and is not remotely the same person she was in 1999.

The world has moved on from those tremulous Boomer anxieties. Well, most of the world has. But Dowd and Cohen are here to remind us that the knives will once again be unsheathed. Dowd’s column was notable only for the fact that she found the flimsiest pretense possible for printing the name Gennifer Flowers, and Cohen is in a lather because Clinton doesn’t have a message yet (of course, if she did, he’d be writing about how having one so early openly showed Clinton’s breathtaking chutzpah). Of Matthews, though, we must say that he has moved on: he has understood, to his great credit, from very early on how lunatic and dangerous today’s Republican Party has become, and he’s changed his tune accordingly.

Matthews’s change is important. Back in the 1990s, there seemed to many people to be little truly at stake in our politics. The Cold War was won. The parties disagreed, of course, and money was rotting the system, yes. But the corrosive effects of both polarization and legal corruption were nothing compared to today. And one of our two major parties hadn’t yet lost its collective mind. This was the historical era when many center-liberals decided it was cooler to bash liberalism than conservatism—when Slate was born, for example, specializing as it did (and still does a bit, but not nearly as much) in producing the “counter-intuitive” “liberal” take on something like why Charles Murray might be right about IQ after all.

That era is pretty close to dead, thankfully. But in a certain kind of pundit, Hillary Clinton will always inspire the same kind of reaction she did two decades ago. It will make for tedious reading, but it will end up helping Clinton, this superficial japery, because the rest of the country understands that the stakes are too high now, and any journalism that doesn’t sink its teeth into that problem will just look silly. And the curse of the Boomer psychodrama about the Clintons will be canceled for lack of interest.