The Post-Obama Democratic Party

Daniel Greenfield article

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The Post-Obama Democratic Party Posted: 13 May 2013 11:23 PM PDT Two elections ago, the Democratic Party was on the verge of being torn to shreds. After a long series of dirty tricks and one stolen election later, there was an uncomfortable coming together. Obama and his cronies kept most of the important positions, while the Clintonites got a few pieces of the foreign policy apparatus. The arrangement satisfied no one, but it kept ticking along until the Benghazi attacks happened. By the time Benghazi happened, Clinton and Obama needed each other more than ever.  Obama needed the Clintons on the campaign trail to sell him to more moderate Democrats who remembered that times had been better under Bill. Hillary needed Obama to anoint her as his intended successor. The awkward dance, complete with an injury, a congressional hearing and a 60 Minutes interview and then the real fireworks began. Hillary Clinton had turned lemons into lemonade, getting what she could out of Obama. State had looked like a good spot for her because it would insulate her from the backlash over the economy. And she would have gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for Benghazi. It wasn't quite leaving on a high note, but as bad as Benghazi was, no one in their right mind would want to be associated with what is going to happen in Afghanistan. At least no one who isn't as dumb as Hanoi John who began his career with Viet Cong and Sandinista pandering and will end it watching the Taliban take Kabul. Benghazi hasn't slowed Hillary Clinton down. And her target is the same old target from 2008. We're back in that 3 A.M. phone call territory. The truce between Obama and Hillary Clinton ended on 60 Minutes. It's not exactly war, but it is politics. While Obama and his cronies plot out the second term, Hillary Clinton is plotting out her election campaign. These days every presidential campaign begins with the ceremonial burial of your own party's predecessor. It wasn't just McCain who kept a careful distance from Bush, Gore kept a careful distance from Clinton and Bush Sr. kept a careful distance from Reagan. The reinvention invariably involves the ritual jettisoning of some portions of your predecessor's program and personality. Hillary Clinton isn't betting on being able to ride Obama's coattails. Not only are the coattails short, but the same electorate of younger and minority voters whose turnout he could count on, won't be quite as eager to come out for her. Her people are not betting on Obama's strategy of dismissing mainstream voters and counting on making it up with a passionate base. To win, Hillary Clinton will have to win back some of the same voters that Obama alienated during his two terms. The script is already written. You can spot it peeking through select mainstream media editorials. Watch for those instances where mainstream media pundits blame Obama's inexperience and his failure to reach out across the aisle for his shortcomings. Those mentions aren't so much an attack on Obama as they are a campaign sign reading, "Hillary 2016." It's subtle for now, but a year from now, those grudging admissions that Obama fell short in some areas will come with the strong suggestion that next time around, someone more experienced and more able to build bridges could do better. Republicans will rightly wonder on which planet Hillary Clinton is an experienced bipartisan leader. But compared to Obama, she is, and these days we are grading on one very gentle curve. Clinton had begun building that image for the 2008 election and now her people are taking it out and dusting it off again. The Democratic Party is being given the chance to choose the sensible experienced candidate that it failed to choose last time around. And the fact that the candidate in question is actually neither is one of those things that doesn't really make a difference. In preparing for a Post-Bush candidacy, Hillary gambled that the public would want someone a little more to the right and so she cultivated an image as a conservative member of the Democratic Party. Not only did she cultivate the image, but she made an occasional effort to vote that way and build those alliances. It was good planning, but a bad bet. Unlike Bill, Hillary was never an instinctual politician. Bill plays it by ear, while Hillary makes long term plans and is caught by surprise. The strange thing about her 2016 campaign prep is that she appears to be following the same playbook. But on the other hand it might not be so strange at all. The Democratic Party is uneasily planning its own Post-Obama future and the news isn't particularly good. The Republican Party never became the Party of Bush, but the Democratic Party is the party of Obama. Obama and his cronies have built up a shadow party of the left made up of SuperPACs and think tanks that overlaps with the Democratic Party, but has no real investment in it. The unveiling of OFA, completes the marginalization of the Democratic Party at the hands of a lefty technocratic infrastructure that looks a lot like the bare bones of a third party. Meanwhile the jackass party has been taking a political beating with no respite. It is doing even worse in the leadership department than the GOP and its party identification numbers are down in an imperial system where the voters care more about Obama's unilateral lawmaking, than about voting the Democratic ticket. The Democratic Party needs a post-Obama future and the Clintons have the resources and names to tie the organization together and turn it into something more than a way to get names for Obama's private fundraising and mailing list. Hillary Clinton had too much of the wrong history attached to her in 2008, but in 2016, all that history may suddenly be good history. After eight years, everyone is tired of new blood and will settle for some old blood with more modest ambitions. And that brings us back to Benghazi. State was supposed to be a smooth ride for Hillary Clinton, full of photo ops that suggest experience. No one was counting on her bringing a scandal back with her. But the one thing Hillary Clinton can be relied on to do is find a scandal and bring it back no matter where she is or what she does. Benghazi intersected dangerously with the presidential ambitions of two candidates. Obama needed to shut down Benghazi in 2012 and Hillary needs to bury it long before the primaries, because if she doesn't, her party rivals will use it to bury her. And that's where things begin wandering into a new territory in which the old political rules no longer apply. In Term 1, Obama and Clinton were untouchable by the media. As Term 2 winds on, they will become bigger targets for both Republicans and Democrats. And the media will begin bending against them. It's easy to read that as an accretion of disgust, but it's just politics. The media appeared to turn on Bill Clinton toward the end, but it wasn't fed up with his sleazy ways, instead it was establishing Al Gore as an ethical contrast to Bill. The idea may be ridiculous, but it nearly worked and giving Bill Clinton a kick on the way out helped sell his own VP as an alternative to his own boss. Before too long, it will be Obama's turn to get kicked for Hillary's sake. And it will be both their turns to get kicked for the sake of a preferred alternative to either one of them. No matter how much the media swooned over Obama, it will feed him to the dogs in a minute if the domestic or international situation gets to the point that it did for Bush toward the end. Any number of events, including a complete health care disaster or a series of Taliban victories in Afghanistan could bring that on. But even if nothing that big happens, the malaise will likely mean that Obama will not get the Great Leader sendoff that some of his supporters imagined he would. The media isn't loyal to Obama. It's loyal to the left and it will destroy Obama for the sake of its bigger goals. But Obama may have his own agenda. The left succeeded in hijacking the 2008 election. And who is to say that OFA will go away when Obama does? The odds are good that it will not. And that means that a second civil war may be brewing, this time with a much tougher left taking on a weakened Democratic Party stripped of many of its moderate figures.   The Democratic Party may want someone who can heal some of the wounds of ObamaCare and reassure gun owners that they can come back, but that isn't what the left wants. And if Hillary can't figure out how to sell her candidacy as being all things to all Democrats, the sort of trick that Bill used to be able to easily pull off, then things will get ugly. All this isn't about what will happen in 2016, but what is already happening now. Clinton's people are planting stories undermining Obama. And what are Obama's people doing? That's the question. A Republican leadership that is routinely inept suddenly had two breakthroughs; one in Benghazi and one in the IRS. The IRS material is being served up on a silver platter, suggesting that is a distraction. The two scandals cut different ways. Benghazi hurts Obama, but it hurts Clinton more. The IRS is all Obama. It can't be deposited at Clinton's door and its narrative serves her interests. Benghazi isn't likely to keep Hillary out of the Democratic field in 2016, but after 2008, she is justifiably paranoid. Any appearance of weakness can only embolden another Obama to challenge her and for 2016, as for 2008, her strategy is to be so inevitable that she will never even be challenged. It's not much of a plan, but it's why she needs to see Benghazi dead and buried in every sense of the word.   Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Put Not Your Trust in Politicians Posted: 13 May 2013 08:28 AM PDT The most obvious lessons of the defeat of gun control and the push for illegal alien amnesty is that politicians don't matter. People do. The Tea Party invested its energy into electing the right people, but as Rick Scott and Marco Rubio showed us, there may be no such thing as the right people. Politicians are in the business of selling out. The difference between Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist was that Rubio hadn't really been tested. But that doesn't mean politics is hopeless. It means politicians are hopeless. People however can still force politicians to do the right thing. The NRA won its fight against gun control even though all the odds, political, financial and emotional, were stacked against it. Politicians had every reason to defect and evolve into a new understanding. And some did. But the ground held because enough of them knew that the NRA was in it for the long term and they would have to deal with it long after Bloomberg had moved on. In 2012, amnesty and gun control both appeared to be equally unacceptable and were shunned by Republican politicians. If anything they shunned amnesty even harder than gun control. But one election loss later and most of the stalwarts, including Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan have jumped on the amnesty train. Victor Davis Hanson observes that, "in these divided times ideology and politics can easily trump considerations about character." But accepting that character doesn't matter may just be practical politics. There may be leaders of good character out there who firmly resolve to do the right thing and never waver from their course, but they are the exception and the political system is designed to weed them out. The self-motivated politician who never wavers is a lot to ask of any man. Even Churchill eventually buckled to Stalin. What can one expect of the senator from Idaho or Virginia? Politics is not about politicians. It's about people. Politicians are just the brokers in the political process. The real lesson of the Tea Party is not that you can intervene in a primary for the most conservative candidate and then sit back while he does the right thing, it's that the only way to get the right thing done is to have an organization that is constantly involved in the political process. Prohibition, an insane policy, was largely rammed through by a clever and relentless organization that built alliances and forced the issue down the throats of politicians who didn't agree with it. The same tactics have been used for a variety of causes, including, most recently, gay marriage. In each case, most politicians who did not agree with a cause, came around on it because it was smart politics. The politician who evolves concedes that he is up for grabs. Evolutionary announcements should be met with contempt, but they also signal that a politician who flips can be made to flop back again. Treating him as if he were an intelligent thinking individual with principles may be a mistake. It may be easier to assume that he has neither principles nor character and that he will go whichever way seems easiest. And the trick then is to reshape his environment so that he evolves into another shape. For all the complaints that we need leaders, leaders may be the one thing that we do not need. The sort of people that we associate with leaders tend to be self-willed men with their own agendas. Christie and Bloomberg are both leaders, but their version of leadership is to pursue their private agendas without any accountability or regard for anyone else. What we need are not leaders, but organizations that are better at holding politicians accountable. Hunting for principled politicians is like searching for buried treasure. It's nice if we find some, but we can't assume that we will. The professional politician excels at pretending to have principles and then selling them out. Finding an honest one is like trying to buy a Rolex watch at a folding card table near Times Square. You may get the real deal, but the odds are that you will be ripped off because the people you are dealing with are trained con artists. They have pulled the same scam a thousand times. They are better at reading you than you are at reading them. What politicians really do is move money around. They push pork for their friends and supporters who then reward them by making sure that they get reelected. It's a simple financial transaction and any principles can only get in the way of it. They are salesmen for government spending and like all salesmen, they need a pitch strategy because "I'm going to give 10 million dollars of your money to the people who contribute to my campaign and organize groups that support me" is not a winner. We may have reached the point where it's smarter to ignore the pitch strategy, the stories, the speaking style, the declaration of principles, the Heritage approved reading list, and reduce everything back to a simple business transaction free of any hero worship or commitments. It's not smart for small government conservatives to believe in politicians anyway. If politicians were worth believing in, then one of the main arguments against small government trickles away. If there were a breed of politicians that weren't hungry for power and able to find the balance between rights and regulations, why shouldn't we trust them to run things? Such a breed of philosopher-kings doesn't exist. And will never exist. Most people, of all factions, rightly hold politicians in contempt and are suspicious of governments. The Tea Party would have done better to keep its distance from politicians, instead of allowing too many of them to wrap themselves in the Tea Party brand. Too much energy was wasted in getting behind politicians, instead of getting on top of them. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"was the old Roman question. Who watches the watchmen? Politicians are a poor accountability method. They aren't going to hold themselves accountable. Trying to play Diogenes hunting for an honest politician in Washington D.C. is an even bigger waste of time. There are hardly any and they may not be the ones you think are. Politicians are tools. They were meant to be wielded by the people. A good politician understands that he is being held accountable. A bad politician doesn't. Politicians don't pay attention to people. They pay attention to organizations. The only way to lock in good behavior by a politician is to lock them into an organization that is capable of rewarding or punishing him. The organization can't just be money. There is an entire political class built around activism that consumes money and does nothing. The 2012 campaign should have been an education in that. The left isn't just successful because it has billionaires, but because it successfully organizes people. The successful organization of people is the difference between 2010 and 2012. If 2014 and 2016 are going to be any different, it will come down to building organizations that can transform the process. Single-issue organizations like the NRA can be very effective. So can larger scale organizations. Many of them exist, but what they really require is ground level organizing. Money is cheap. People are hard to come by. If conservative policies are going to win out, the decentralized conservative presence of the internet is going to have to be more directly leveraged in the real world. The people already exist. Bringing them into play in a structured way is what is missing. The 2010 elections showed what is possible when the people get involved. And the 2012 elections showed what happens when the political class leaves the people behind. Sometimes the people class can win on its own, but even when it does, its victory, like all political class agendas, is a prelude to another sellout. Principles can't come from politicians because politics is now largely an economic transaction. They can only come from people who do not benefit from those government class transactions. The left has built a shadow government of organizations,  but it has done so while linking those organizations to small, but sizable numbers of organizers and activists, who can rally the base. The right will have to duplicate its accomplishments if it doesn't want to see the politicians that it wastes money and energy electing constantly "evolve" to the left. Some readers have complained that this blog is too hostile or negative toward Republican politicians. If anything it's not nearly negative enough. Cheerleading for favorite politicians is a waste of time. The solutions will not come from messiahs in suits. It will come when the number of conservative issues that politicians come to see as the third rail expands beyond gun control. It will come when the professional political infrastructure is contained by a conservative activist infrastructure that is as least as effective and powerful as its counterpart on the left. It will come when we stop believing in electing the right man and accept that the honest politician is the one who stays bought. It may not be romantic or idealistic, but it is far more practical than waiting for the next Marco Rubio to come around.   Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

 

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