Clinton to Progressives: Drop Dead!

The Clinton camp has dropped something of a bombshell:

One of the most important decisions that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton made about her bid for the presidency came late last year when she ended a debate in her camp over whether she should repudiate her 2002 vote authorizing military action in Iraq...

Yet antiwar anger has festered, and yesterday morning Mrs. Clinton rolled out a new response to those demanding contrition: She said she was willing to lose support from voters rather than make an apology she did not believe in.

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

The very next paragraph cuts right to the point:

Her decision not to apologize is regarded so seriously within her campaign that some advisers believe it will be remembered as a turning point in the race: either ultimately galvanizing voters against her (if she loses the nomination), or highlighting her resolve and her willingness to buck Democratic conventional wisdom (if she wins).

Gee, ya think?

I'm not going to mince words: Clinton's campaign just passed a point of no return which it will likely come to rue in the coming months.

The issue is only incidentally about apologizing for her decision to stand with the militarists in 2002. As Kos comments with eminent good sense: "I don't want her to apologize. I want her to say, 'I made a mistake.' Edwards did it. Just about every other Democrat who idiotically trusted this president and supported the war has done it. Had Hillary done this last year, the issue would be moot." It is far more crucially about her relationship with the Democratic party's grassroots -the activists on which any nomination campaign is vitally dependent for donations and especially volunteers. Clinton just told a great many of them, already unhappy with her obtuseness on this issue, to basically pound dirt.

And they will -right to Obama or Edwards (as she herself helpfully suggests), or possibly Richards.

The best part is how the Clinton campaign has tried to justify this move. One campaign aide quoted anonymously in the Times piece, who obviously lobbied for it, offers this rationale:

She is in a box now on her Iraq vote, but she doesn’t want to be in a different, even worse box — the vacillating, flip-flopping Democratic candidate that went to defeat in 2000 and ‘04,” said one adviser to Mrs. Clinton. “She wants to maintain a firmness, and I think a lot of people around her hope she maintains a firmness. That’s what people will want in 2008."

The incredible irony here is that Clinton is taking advice from the same people who led the Democrats over a cliff in 2000 and 2004 and, even better, who are now using their past failures to justify adopting the the same strategy in 2008.

The problem that Gore and Kerry had wasn't that they "flip flopped" on national security, but rather that they took their counsel from the so called "centrists" in the party establishment who held that "mainstream" America had an inherent conservative bias and that the Democrats had to finesse rather than accentuate policy differences with Republicans or risk political marginalization. In particular the centrists, led by the Democratic Leadership Council, argued that it would be political suicide for to listen to the party's progressive wing and offer an alternative to voters that differed sharply from Republican positions on tax policy, foreign affairs, health care, and so on. The result was that Gore chose as his running mate arch centrist Joe Lieberman -who (in case you haven't been keeping up with current events) is now an outcast from his own party- and Kerry ran a campaign that focused on his supposed national security bona fides to the virtual exclusion of everything else.

Both lost.

At least Gore learned from his mistakes and backed Howard Dean, the outside the beltway darling of the party's progressives, in 2004, over his own former running mate. Not that it prevented the DLC, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, from destroying Dean's candidacy so that the nomination could be secured for a safe, "electable" politician like Kerry.

By contrast in 2006, with the centrist hold on the party weakened by spectacular back to back failures, the Democrats wrested back control of Congress in no small part (centrist attempts to rain on their parade notwithstanding) by putting forward candidates who were unapologetic about the differences between a Democrat and a Republican.

Now Clinton appears to have fallen under the spell of the same quacks in whom Gore and Kerry placed their trust (not necessarily surprisingly, since her husband was closely identified with the centrist element of the party). This is the same timid, mealy mouthed "we can't afford to stray too far from the Republicans" talk we've heard in the previous campaigns. The difference is that whereas in 2000 playing hardball with the Republicans admittedly entailed a calculated element of risk, in 2007, with Bush's approval in free fall and his presidency visibly crumbling, disassociating yourself from this trainwreck would seem to be a no brainer. For the love of the Almighty, if this isn't the right time to proclaim yourself the anti-Bush when is?

And the ultimate irony? In the end Kerry's attempt to out-Republican the Republicans on national security didn't prevent Swift Boat Veterans for Truth from dragging his reputation through the mud. Newsflash Hillary: these people play for all the marbles, and they play to win. Sure you can innoculate yourself against the accusation of being a "flip flopper" -at the expense of alienating a large part of the party base- but you can't hide from the slime attacks that are coming as surely as night follows day.

They'll just find another angle to work. It's what they do.

The Unbearable Triteness of Being

So I found myself in scenic Grande Cache a couple of days ago and had the opportunity to peruse the local Asper newspaper offering, The Edmonton Journal, over breakfast.

The top of the front page referred readers to opinion pieces by resident scribes Paula Simons (“Time for a Smarter Climate Change Debate”) and Gary Lamphier (“Kyoto Accord is a Dead Duck”). Now I admit I have a prejudice against most newspaper columnists, in that I consider them poorly informed idiots peddling the most trite conventional nostrums, often with the kind of slipshod, self serving reasoning that would embarrass a first year liberal arts student. And I particularly believe that there is one ring in hell reserved for alumni of the CanWest media empire, who are not merely run of the mill hacks but hacks who have sold their souls to the Dark Prince Leonard Asper, who demands above all from his employees not talent, and certainly not professional integrity, but rather loyalty to the principle that the CanWest empire exists first and foremost to promote the Aspers’ own political agenda. Toe the line and you will be liberally rewarded, but show the slightest inclination to your own opinion and you will be turffed out on your ungrateful ass and replaced with more compliant journalistic drones who understand what side their bread is buttered on, as more than a few people who harbored quaint notions of editorial independence have found out during the consolidation of the empire.

Having said all that I’m always hopeful for signs that CanWest can be redeemed, so I dutifully gave Simons and Lamphier the benefit of the doubt. It almost goes without saying that this tale ends in bitter disappointment, eased only slightly by the realization that I’ve been down this road more than a few times before. Call it the triumph of hope over experience.

Now that I’ve had a few days to mull it over, I’ve decided that the Simons and Lamphier pieces are best understood as the rhetorical equivalent of a fighting retreat. As we all know on February 3, five days before the pieces appeared, the UN issued an alarming report on global warming that characterized the evidence as “unequivocal”. The scientific consensus about climate change has solidified to the point that a continuation of the strategy heretofore favored by the antediluvian deniers of global warming, namely that the evidence is ambiguous and there is no consensus, simply makes them look ridiculous. Since CanWest was at the forefront of opposing emissions controls, especially in oil rich Alberta, a new approach was required.

One of the indispensable skills of an able propagandist is of course the ability to change tack on a dime and argue the reverse of the position they previously held, when it serves the needs of their paymaster to do so. Simons and Lamphier don’t quite go that far, but they use remarkably similar rhetorical strategies to try to make the best of a bad hand. First, they try to cover up their past misdeeds by seizing the offensive and insisting that they are “serious” about addressing the problem while by implication their opponents –who it turns out where right all along- are “unserious”. Then, realizing that denying the science of climate change is now a non starter, they try to shape the coming debate by defining its parameters, and specifically by insisting that certain measures be declared off limits right from the start and taken off the table. The objective of preventing public policy from dealing seriously with the threat posed by climate change is the same, only the tactics have changed.

I’m going to dissect Simons’ piece here, since it was the first one I read. Suffice it to say that Lamphier’s is very much cast from the same mould.

Simons position can be summarized in a single sentence: “Nothing we’re doing to reduce our carbon dioxide output will make much difference”.

To whit:

If you want to install energy efficient windows, drive a hybrid, fill up with ethanol gasoline, put up LED Christmas lights, buy your produce at the famers market or live in the city core instead of the suburbs, be my guest, if it makes you feel better. I do half of those things myself.

But if we think buying local asparagus or buying a downtown loft will save the polar bears, we’re dreaming. Much of the green lifestyle posturing we’re seeing around us is just that – a trendy fashion choice, an upper middle class indulgence.

See Simons is serious about climate change, and what she characterizes as the “green zealots” are not. In fact Simons, like other serious people, realizes that climate change cannot in fact be stopped, so why bother even trying?

I will not bother with the obvious fact that Simons offers no actual evidence for her position. One of the joys of being a newspaper columnist is that since you are merely expressing an opinion –and usually a very ill informed and trite one- you cannot be held to the same evidentiary standard as, say, the local high school debating team. Anyway it is self evident your opinion is worthwhile, it is after all being published in the paper and the Aspers are maintaining you in the same upper middle class lifestyle as the peers you affect to despise for expressing it. In our society, in which your worth as a human being is essentially determined by the size of your paycheck, that point is unanswerable.

In any case we have now come full rhetorical circle: once the climate change deniers said climate change wasn’t real so we didn’t have to do anything about it. Now they say it is real but it doesn’t matter, since we can’t do anything about it.

But here’s the real kicker, in which Simons inadvertently gives the whole game away: “The citizens of the industrialized world would never willingly accept the radical lifestyle sacrifices that would slow climate change”. One might well wonder what qualifies Simons to speak for “the citizens of the industrialized world”, until one realizes that she is exercising the well established newspaper columnist’s prerogative of transcribing her own personal preferences onto the rest of the world: it will be a cold, cold day in hell when Paula Simons trades in her gas guzzling SUV for a SmartCar, and she just knows all her fellow pampered and privileged members of the upper middle class are with her! (Granted even this group represents only a relatively small segment of society as a whole, but in the minds of people like Simons it’s the only segment that really matters).

The sheer sense of entitlement reflected in this statement is simply breathtaking. Could it possibly be true that Simons leads such a sheltered existence that she simply does not comprehend that if the climate change science is right –and even she now half heartedly acknowledges that it is- we are all in for radical lifestyle changes, whether we like it or not? Just how puerile does one have to be to believe that you can tell Mother Nature, a la Marie Antoinette, to go “eat cake”?

But Simons saves the worst for last. Having already argued the futility of trying to fight climate change she abruptly changes course and asserts “We can’t throw up our hands in defeat” (perish the thought), thus showing that she doesn’t even have the courage of her convictions. Having already dismissed lifestyle changes as one possible part of the solution, what does Simons have to offer instead?

Technological solutions –carbon sequestration, new fuels, new cars- offer more hope. But they won’t happen without public policy and economic incentives that drive market innovation. Make it too expensive and inconvenient for carbon-emitting industries to do business as usual, and change will inevitably happen.

Now Simons is actually starting to talk some sense, though it is far too little and too late to redeem the atrocities she has already committed against science, reason and common sense. It is obvious at this point that in her mind what separates viable (read: technology based) strategies for controlling global warming from non viable (read: lifestyle based) ones isn’t any hard facts –facts are after all an unjustified encumbrance on the newspaper columnist’s sovereign right to proffer any opinion, no matter how outrageous- but that the latter will presumably entail certain sacrifices Simons would rather not make, while the former hold out the prospect of a sacrifice free solution to global warming.

Actually, now that I think about it, Simons position here is almost identical to that of Peak Oil optimists whose blind faith in “technology” assures them that even if the earth is running out of petroleum we will find sufficient substitutes quickly enough to avoid any really inconvenient dislocation in the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed.

In both cases of course this kind of thinking betrays a certain lack of familiarity with obdurate reality , the kind that might arise for example if one earned (and I use that term loosely) one’s daily bread by writing insipid opinion pieces for the Aspers. The important thing is that in spite of her call for “real action” and “a smarter climate change debate” Simons devotes less than 50 words (quoted above) of an 800 word piece on possible solutions. Most of the rest of the piece is about what Simons doesn’t want to see happen, which is to say any approach that would impinge on her comfortable lifestyle.

People who are thinking seriously about the implications of climate change have accepted the science and moved on to the difficult question of what we are going to do about it. People like Simons are still fighting the last war all over again: even as they claim to (finally) accept the validity of the science, they still hold fast to the core principle which has always animated their opposition -that any changes to their lifestyle or standard of living is a priori non negotiable.

The irony of course is that in adopting a no compromises position now they are probably only ensuring we will all pay a much heavier price than would otherwise have been necessary later.

The Romans had a saying relevant to this topic: Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. It literally means "you can drive nature out with a pitchfork but she always comes back". A more succinct rendition however would be (with apologies to Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park) "Don't fuck with Mother Nature".

Paula Simons of the world take heed.