3 DAYS OF THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION: Ode to Bill and Hillary

With respect to good old Joe and Michelle Obama, the first three days of the Democratic National Convention were all about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden comes from the right place. The son of working people from Scranton, Pennsylvania cares for the right reasons. (I admit, when he goes off on foreign policy he raises my concerns but not a fraction of the concerns I have for the old warrior on the other side of the presidential race.) He gave a good speech – a mixture of who I am and where I’m from with the obligatory partisan attack – but he found out what an actor finds out when he has to follow a dog or a child act.

The night belonged to Bill Clinton.

On opening night, Michelle Obama presented the story that folds the Obama family into the American dream but the buzz was all about Hillary. On Tuesday night, Hillary delivered a finer speech than any she gave for her own campaign. She covered all the bases, silencing for now her critics’ insistence that she secretly wanted Obama to lose in the general election. The pundits demanded that Hillary mend the wounds that divided her supporters from Obama but she was also fighting to build a bridge to Obama’s supporters – including the black community – for if she has another campaign, she will need them to win.

On Thursday night Bill took the podium for what was supposed to be a ten-minute speech. He was billed the last holdout, an embittered ex-president jealous of the newcomer and angry that his legacy was imperiled. The old political warrior laid down his sword and embraced a noble adversary. He put his cards on the table and placed his treasured legacy in the young and vibrant hands of Barack Obama.

It is as ironic as it is true that Obama is very much like the Bill Clinton of 1992. He presents the same hopes and the same liabilities and he is at heart a pragmatist.

Their dominance of the first three days of the convention served to remind us not only how and why the Clintons rose to lead the Democratic party but also how and why it ended with this nomination.

None should doubt that if Hillary Clinton had the courage, the foresight and the judgment to oppose the Iraq War back in 2003, she would be standing as the Democratic nominee for president today.

The most meaningful message in her defeat is that there is a price to be paid for supporting an aggressive and unnecessary war against the interests of the nation. That it came at the cost of sacrificing the possibility of our first woman president is lamentable but the greater good was served.

One of the most profound shadows still lingering over this Democratic Party is the myth that they were misled into supporting the war. The nation was misled but the nation’s politicians were hand-slapped into climbing aboard the war train. They were afraid that the post-911 war fever would endure to the next election. They were afraid that the cry for blood vengeance, however irrational, would overwhelm the facts. They were afraid that the war, however unfounded and grossly immoral, would go well enough to enable the president to claim a victory that would overshadow the loss and the shame with patriotic fervor.

They were wrong, Obama was right and that was enough to mark the path of Obama’s unlikely victory.

It was Bill Clinton’s presidency that made Hillary’s run possible but it was also his presidency that led the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to doubt her credibility and sincerity as a pro-labor and antiwar candidate.

Midway through his first term, Bill Clinton abandoned the left and led a conservative revolution with welfare reform, corporate deregulation and global "free" trade.

Right or wrong, Hillary carried Bill’s baggage. We did not want to be fooled again.

But the former president had a lot going for him in the wake of the disastrous Bush years. When he took the stage at the Democratic convention, he got it right: The Republicans finally got to do almost everything they always wanted to do under the second Bush. For six years they had control of both houses of congress, the Supreme Court and the White House.

They took government out of the business of governing. They awarded control of energy policy to the oil industry. They gave control of trade policy to international corporations. They lowered the tax burden on the people who needed it least. They gutted unions and destroyed worker’s rights. They watched jobs go overseas, homes foreclosed, wages decline, debt rise, inflation rear its ugly head and they refused to act. They handicapped public education with obsessive testing and unfunded mandates while pointing the way to private faith-based education. They treated a natural disaster as a public relations problem and allowed a hurricane to wipe out a treasured American city.

The only unfinished business on the domestic front was the privatization of social security and Medicare.

When the tragedy of September 11, 2001 gave them an opportunity, they launched a policy of aggressive war for foreign oil with nothing short of catastrophic results.

Bill Clinton got it right: They beat the maverick out of John McCain and saddled him on the same old horse. Now they want four more years to finish the job.

It cannot work. No one could be so foolish, so blinded by the dazzle of party politics, to allow them another term.

John McCain has the same economic and foreign policy advisers as the Bush team and he has lost the will to lead. What remains of the old warrior is just the ambition to wear the crown.

Tragically, the state of American politics is so warped and distorted, where the affairs of state run a poor second to the affairs of fallen candidates, that McCain still has a chance.

But tonight belonged to the Clintons.

Tomorrow belongs to Barack Obama.

Jazz.

Random Jack
Jack's Blog, Random Voices