Yesterday J.P. Green did a post discussing the legacy left by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, focusing on her glass-ceiling-battering example to women in politics and government.
While that’s probably her most important legacy, there are others. And today the American Prospect has published a colloquoy on Clinton’s contributions to the progressive cause, featuring essays by feminist blogger K.A. Geier, Prospect Co-Editor Paul Starr, Chris Hayes of The Nation, Salon‘s Rebecca Traister, author Kai Wright, Moira Whelan of the National Security Network, and yours truly.
I focused (rather counter-intuitively) on HRC’s positioning on Iraq, which helped resolve what looked, a year ago, like a horribly corrosive intraparty disagreement over withdrawal plans and appropriations cutoffs. Others talked about Clinton contributions ranging from health care policy to the politics of gender and race.
Check it out.
One comment on “Hillary’s Enduring Legacy, Part 2”
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Amazing that Democrats are simply missing such a good opportunity. McCain, responding to Democrats’ charge that he’s running for a Bush third term, is countering with a charge that Obama is running for Jimmy Carter’s second term. Democrats seem to have forgotten that Jimmy Carter crusaded for developing alternative fuel sources. The Republicans ridiculed him and succeeded in derailing all efforts he’d made in that direction. When Reagan took office, he killed every initiative made my Carter to do that. There are obviously places you could find Reagan attacking him on that basis for a damning indictment of the present Republican attempt to distract people from the obvious. The Republicans are defending their latest obstruction of a profiteering tax on oil companies, and saying that it’s a “gimmick”. They claim all we need to do is destroy the ecology of the planet by drilling in the all our wildlife preserves. The truth is, we’d already have alternative fuel sources if Jimmy Carter’s initiatives had been allowed to continue.
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.
Amazing that Democrats are simply missing such a good opportunity. McCain, responding to Democrats’ charge that he’s running for a Bush third term, is countering with a charge that Obama is running for Jimmy Carter’s second term. Democrats seem to have forgotten that Jimmy Carter crusaded for developing alternative fuel sources. The Republicans ridiculed him and succeeded in derailing all efforts he’d made in that direction. When Reagan took office, he killed every initiative made my Carter to do that. There are obviously places you could find Reagan attacking him on that basis for a damning indictment of the present Republican attempt to distract people from the obvious. The Republicans are defending their latest obstruction of a profiteering tax on oil companies, and saying that it’s a “gimmick”. They claim all we need to do is destroy the ecology of the planet by drilling in the all our wildlife preserves. The truth is, we’d already have alternative fuel sources if Jimmy Carter’s initiatives had been allowed to continue.