Ta-Nehisi Coates Sends Us to the Great Jon Chait On the Spiro Ted Agnewization of Hillary Rodham Clinton

Ta-Nehisi Coates reads the New Republic so we don't have to risk catching a loathesome disease, and finds a gem: The Great Jon Chait On Hillary's Conservative Populism.

One cavil.. Jon Chait says that the fact that Bill and Hillary Clinton "obviously [do] not believe... [their] social conservative rhetoric" is a defense of their actions. I do not understand in what way this is supposed to be a defense. First, it may not be true: the easiest people for you to con are those whom you wink at and who then think that they are in on the con. Second and more important, this is, as Greg Mankiw puts it and as Paul Krugman does not see, a character issue--I think the most important character issue. And it cuts heavily for Obama, and against Rodham Clinton and McCain.

Here is Chait on the mysterious transformation of Bill and Hillary Clinton into clones of Spiro Ted Agnew:

Let Them Eat Arugula: The dying days of the Hillary Clinton campaign have brought the breathtaking spectacle of a candidate lashing out at every element of public life that has nourished her career. The über-wonk has disparaged economists and expertise. The staunch ally of black America has attacked her opponent for lacking support of "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans." People who thought they knew Hillary Clinton have gazed in astonishment: What has she become? The answer is, a conservative populist....

Liberal populism posits that the rich wield disproportionate influence over the government and push for policies often at odds with most people's interest. Conservative populism... prefers to divide society along social lines, with the elites being intellectuals and other snobs who fancy themselves better....

Consider this analysis recently offered by Bill Clinton in Clarksburg, West Virginia: "The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules." This is precisely the dynamic that allows multimillionaires like George W. Bush and Bill O'Reilly to present themselves as being on the side of the little guy. A more classic expression of conservative populism cannot be found.

Historically, the conservative populist's social divide ran along racial and ethnic lines.... [Today it's] nostalgia about small towns... stronger values... work harder... overwhelmingly white.... Bill Clinton recently declared, "The people in small towns in rural America, who do the work for America, and represent the backbone and the values of this country, they are the people that are carrying her through in this nomination." The corollary--that strong values and hard work is in shorter supply among ethnically heterogeneous urban residents--is left unstated....

Liberal populism is... harnessed to a concrete legislative program aimed at broadening prosperity.... Conservative populism... is a way of exploiting the grievances it identifies without redressing them. It has an ever-shifting array of targets--Michael Dukakis's veto of a law requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or the rantings of Jeremiah Wright--but no way to knock them down....

Hillary Clinton's embrace of the gas tax holiday is a miniature example of the same pattern. Her plan... is highly congenial to the interests of oil companies. Yet she presents it as an assault on Big Oil....

If economists or other social scientists dispute the conservative populist's claims, that is only because they, too, are elitists.... Clinton campaign chairman Terry MacAuliffe replied, "Maybe for Barack Obama and for many of your economists, Tim, who you may talk to, you know what, maybe an extra hundred bucks for them isn't a big deal. But I can tell you this, it is a big deal for most Americans."

Social science analysis is the mortal enemy of conservative populism... [because it] sees politics as a series of quantifiable trade-offs between competing interests. The conservative populist offers an appeal that can't be quantified: Who shares your values? Who is more manly? (James Carville: "If she gave him one of her cojones, they'd both have two.")...

[Citing] numbers to back [a] position... [is] to the conservative populist... the intellectual equivalent of buying arugula from Whole Foods. A Clinton endorser addressed a rally last month, "You didn't go to Harvard! You weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth!" (Never mind that Clinton graduated from Yale Law School and had a far more stable, middle class upbringing than Obama.) In the liberal populists' world, the locus of evil is K Street. In the conservative populists' world, the locus of evil is Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In Clinton's defense, she obviously does not believe her own social conservative rhetoric.... [N]either do Republican social conservatives. She is not running for president so she can suspend the gas tax any more than George H. W. Bush sought the office on order to increase the rate of flag-saluting.

One conceit of the conservative populist style is that its practitioners are "real," while its targets are "fake." For years, Hillary Clinton put herself forward as the earnest liberal policy wonk she actually is, while conservatives lambasted her as a phony. Since she started campaigning as the enemy of all she once held dear, some conservatives have started to appreciate her, even lauding her authenticity. The Weekly Standard's Noemie Emery gushed that after March 4, Hillary "began to seem real." Indeed, she is now real in exactly the same way the conservative populists imagine themselves to be.

Comments

[howard]

prof, greg mankiw enabled the bush administration. he is not a witness you want on your side when it comes to discussing "character problems." the fact that you want to call on him might lead some people (not me, mind you!) to think that you have "character problems." see how tricky a game that is?

how about if you lead "character problem" speculation to the trashsheets that enjoy it: you have perfectly functiona, legitimate arguments to make against clinton without debasing yourself to calling on greg mankiw to make a case for "character problem." you're better than that.

[anne]

This is disgraceful, and you should be ashamed for posting such a disgrace.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/opinion/09krugman.html

May 9, 2008

Thinking About November
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The fight for the Democratic nomination seems to be winding down. It's not completely over, but the odds now overwhelmingly favor Barack Obama.

Assuming that Mr. Obama is the nominee, he'll lead a party that, judging by the usual indicators, should be poised for an easy victory — perhaps even a landslide.

Yet Democrats are worried. Are those worries justified?

Before I try to answer that question, let's talk about those indicators.

Political scientists, by and large, believe that what happens on the campaign trail, while it gives talking heads something to talk about, is more or less irrelevant to what happens on Election Day. Instead, they place their faith in statistical analyses that identify three main determinants of presidential voting.

First, votes are affected by the state of the economy — mainly economic performance in the year or so preceding the election.

Second, the approval rating of the current president strongly affects his party's ability to hold power.

Third, the electorate seems to suffer from an eight-year itch: parties rarely manage to hold the White House for more than two terms in a row.

This year, all of these factors strongly favor the Democrats. Indeed, the Democratic Party hasn't enjoyed this favorable a political environment since 1964. Robert Erikson, a political scientist at Columbia, tells me: "It would be difficult to find any serious indicator that does not point to a Democratic victory in 2008."

What about polls that still seem to give John McCain a good chance of winning? Pay no attention, say the experts: general election polls this early tell you almost nothing about what will happen in November. Remember 1992: as late as June, Gallup put Ross Perot in first place, Bill Clinton in third.

There's just one thing that should give Democrats pause — but it's a big one: the fight for the nomination has divided the party along class and race lines in a way that I believe is unprecedented, at least in modern times.

Ironically, much of Mr. Obama's initial appeal was the hope that he could transcend these divisions. At first, voting patterns seemed consistent with this hope. In February, for example, he received the support of half of Virginia's white voters as well as that of a huge majority of African-Americans.

But this week, Mr. Obama, while continuing to win huge African-American majorities, lost North Carolina whites by 23 points, Indiana whites by 22 points. Mr. Obama's white support continues to be concentrated among the highly educated; there was little in Tuesday's results to suggest that his problems with working-class whites have significantly diminished.

Discussions of how and why Mr. Obama's support narrowed over time have a Rashomon-like quality: different observers see very different truths. But at this point it doesn't matter whose fault it was. What does matter is that Mr. Obama appears to have won the nomination with a deep but narrow base consisting of African-Americans and highly educated whites. And now he needs to bring Democrats who opposed him back into the fold.

It's possible that this will happen automatically — that bad feelings from the nomination fight will fade away of their own accord. In recent decades, Democrats have had little trouble unifying after hard-fought primary campaigns.

But this time the division seems to go deeper than ordinary political rivalry. The closest parallel I can think of is the bitter intraparty struggles of the 1920s, which pitted urban, often Catholic Democrats against Protestant farmers.

So what can be done to heal the party's current divisions?

More tirades from Obama supporters against Mrs. Clinton are not the answer — they will only further alienate her grass-roots supporters, many of whom feel that she received a raw deal.

Nor is it helpful to insult the groups that supported Mrs. Clinton, either by suggesting that racism was their only motivation or by minimizing their importance.

After the Pennsylvania primary, David Axelrod, Mr. Obama's campaign manager, airily dismissed concerns about working-class whites, saying that they have "gone to the Republican nominee for many elections." On Tuesday night, Donna Brazile, the Democratic strategist, declared that "we don't have to just rely on white blue-collar voters and Hispanics." That sort of thing has to stop.

One thing the Democrats definitely need to do is give delegates from Florida and Michigan — representatives of citizens who voted in good faith, and whose support the party may well need this November — seats at the convention.

And to the extent that campaigning matters, Mr. Obama should center his campaign on economic issues that matter to working-class families, whatever their race.

The point is that Mr. Obama has an extraordinary opportunity in this year's election. He should do everything possible to avoid squandering it.

[anne]

Paul Krugman

"More tirades from Obama supporters against Mrs. Clinton are not the answer — they will only further alienate her grass-roots supporters, many of whom feel that she received a raw deal."

Each tirade against Hillary Clinton is more alienating than the last. I could not be more angry and disgusted. Being in the very room with the shameful tiraders would be too much for me.

[anne]

Having supported and voted for Barack Obama, I have reached the point of alienation where I am about to turn away. The attacks on Hillary Clinton are completely shockingly alienating and I am near the point of being beyond forgiving. I like and admire Clinton, and find the attacks on Clinton and the bullying by Obama supporters impossible to understand and infuriatingly false.

Clinton is being attacked with an impossible shameful meanness that makes me not wish to have anything at all to do with the attackers. I will remember, and finally do not feel the least forgiving.

I will support any candidate I wish, and vote as I wish; and I will not be bullied by these ceasless attacks, rather the reverse, rather I will defy the attackers.

The idea that a Jon Chait or a Greg Mankiw should lead me to turn away from Clinton is beyond absurd.

[jerry]

"Clinton is being attacked with an impossible shameful meanness that makes me not wish to have anything at all to do with the attackers."

I don't visit conservative blogs unless a link goes there, but from links and from FARK, I know a common conservative complaint is that "There is no hate like liberal hate."

I think the past six months have shown how true this is. The excoriation of Clinton and her supporters. The cries that they are republicans, or crooks, and worse.

Over the past eight years, the "netroots" formed, and then became completely calcified complete with groupthink, and enforced groupthink through namecalling, punishment, and excommunication.

I would like to hope that the netroots will have learned a lesson at the end of this, but I suspect not. I am hopeful that the netroots will just blow up and go away, because in many cases they became big media, friends of big media, and dispensers of big media's talking points.

Going a bit deeper the left and the left blogosphere has some participants in it that stake a claim to be liberal, but when you look at the actual policies they proclaim, are anything but liberal. Groups that call for government intervention on our own bodies, and on your body. Groups that divisively play one sex off against another, or worse, one sex and race off against another. Groups that are not reality based and refuse to examine serious studies regarding the issues they advocate. And groups and bloggers that in the name of creating "safe spaces" practice censorship, smearing, libel, misrepresentation, and lies.

In the name of advocating for one group of seemingly oppressed people, we have many groups in the blogosphere that advocate government action that disregards free speech, due process, equal protection, search and seizure.

As such, and as documented at FIRE (thefire.org), we have the bizarre situation where various leftists not only cede protection of civil liberties to the right, but actually think that protecting civil rights is a bad thing. Well, it's not their civil rights they think should be given up, it's yours. So that's okay.

We constantly ask ourselves why so many middle income people would vote Republican. The fault lies not in Republican lies, but in ourselves, in how we have learned to mistreat people, and call that holy.

Good, non-racist, non-sexist people of all stripes will continue to flee the Democratic Party. Because you can't fool all the people all the time and lots of what progressive liberals advocate for is neither progressive nor liberal.

End of rant.

[Robert Waldmann]

Coase then Coates. Are you working through the alphabet. I hope not, because, if you are, I'm gonna have to wait a lonnnnggggg time for my next link.

[albrt]

Anne, as an Obama supporter I am concerned about the virulence of some of the anti-Clinton posts I have seen on the net. But the piece Brad posted seems pretty accurate and articulate. Maybe George Wallace would be a better comparison that Spiro Agnew, but the main point for me is that most of the real damage to Hillary Clinton has been self inflicted (or Bill inflicted). The mainstream media isn't taking their cues from anonymous posters on the internet - they are getting plenty of material from the campaigns and even more material from playing the game of reacting to each other.

I started out at the beginning of the primaries with not much idea of whom I would vote for. Clinton probably ranked a little above Obama. But Clinton has made an uninterrupted and politically motivated series of really bad choices dating all the way back to her vote for the Iraq war. At this point I'm very glad she isn't going to be president.

[anne]

"Anne, as an Obama supporter I am concerned about the virulence of some of the anti-Clinton posts I have seen on the net. But the piece Brad posted seems pretty accurate and articulate. Maybe George Wallace would be a better comparison that Spiro Agnew, but the main point for me is that most of the real damage to Hillary Clinton has been self inflicted (or Bill inflicted)."

Spiro Agnew
George Wallace

Vile writing!

[anne]

Clinton is being attacked with an impossible shameful meanness that makes me wish not to have anything at all to do with the attackers. I will remember, and finally do not feel the least forgiving.

I will support any candidate I wish, and vote as I wish; and I will not be bullied by these ceasless attacks, rather the reverse, rather I will defy the attackers.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/opinion/11dowd.html

May 11, 2008

Is She a Trojan Rabbit?
By MAUREEN DOWD

If Hillary Clinton were to become Barack Obama's vice president, would she take the back seat or would she just always be plotting, draining him of his magical powers?

[Insane.]

[anne]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/07/AR2008050703188_pf.html

May 8, 2008

Two Weeks of Trivia
By David S. Broder - Washington Post

But if Obama contributed to the Wright fiasco through his hesitancy to break with him, Clinton was worse. She flooded North Carolina and Indiana with phoniness -- playing a drag version of Dennis Kucinich, a beer-drinking populist, not the honors graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School that she is....

[Insane.]

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/opinion/11dowd.html

May 11, 2008

Is She a Trojan Rabbit?
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Now Barack Obama faces a true dilemma: how best to punish Hillary Clinton.

After 15 months of fighting her off, as she veered wildly from bully to victim, as she brandished any ice pick at hand, whether racial, sexual, mathematical or marital (in the form of her Vesuvian husband), Obama must decide the most efficacious means of doing to Hillary what she has been trying to do to him: putting her in her place....

[Insane.]

[anne]

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/Tragedy/macbeth/macbeth.1.5.html

1605

The Tragedy of Macbeth
By William Shakespeare

Act I. Scene V.

Inverness. Macbeth's castle.

MACBETH

My dearest love,
Duncan comes here to-night.

LADY MACBETH

And when goes hence?

MACBETH

To-morrow, as he purposes.

LADY MACBETH

O, never
Shall sun that morrow see!
Your face, my thane, is as a book where men
May read strange matters. To beguile the time,
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under't. He that's coming
Must be provided for: and you shall put
This night's great business into my dispatch;
Which shall to all our nights and days to come
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.

MACBETH

We will speak further.

LADY MACBETH

Only look up clear;
To alter favour ever is to fear:
Leave all the rest to me.

Exeunt

[Metaphor?]

[Bupa]

As I said a few days on Mark Thoma's blog, no person can do more to unify the Democratic party and ensure the defeat of McCain than HRC. She should pull out of the race, endorse BO, and campaign for him.

The Economist leader this week concludes: "It is time for her, at a moment of he choosing, to concede gracefully and throw the considerable weight of the Clintons behind their party's best hope."

You don't have to be a stary-eyed worshiper of BO, nor a Clinton hater to agree with this advice. After 8 years of the worst presidency in history, one would think readers of this blog would stop this petty bickering and focus on the goal of electing a Democratic president and as many Democratic congressmen as possible.

Please stop the bickering, the whining, and the irrelevant extracts for Shakespeare. Let's focus on ousting the theives, thugs, liars and idiots that have been misleading this country for 8 years.

[anne]

Fine, then enough of the shameful attacks on Clinton and the terrible bullying by Obama supporters.

[jerry]

My only problem with the Shakespeare extracts is they are not enough of a clue by four for me to get it. I ask only for a bit of explanation....

[anne]

Hillary Clinton as:

Huey Long
Spiro Agnew
George Wallace
Dennis Kucinich
Trojan Rabbit

...fill in....

Lady Macbeth....

[jerry]

Ah thanks, I appreciate that. I also like:

"Vince Foster, Never Forget!" as a way to denote her pure evilness among the over the top leftosphere who were reminding us all about her "involvement in Whitewater" a few months back.

[Darin London]

I think this all comes down to which candidate will faithfully represent the interests of the party they claim to represent. Many former Republican voters (myself included), are disgusted with the way that the Republicans have shamefully dropped most of their platform in favor of just giving money to rich people. For this reason, I decided that I would rather have big responsible government than big, irresponsible, shamefully biased government. This opened my eyes and ears to what Democrats had to say. So far, the candidate that has steadfastly demonstrated a clear alignment with the platform of the Democratic party has been Barak Obama. Clinton's slide into supporting the Gas Tax Holiday, Annihilating Iran, etc, only hastened my travel as I drove to the NC primary location to cast my vote for Barak Obama.

[jerry]

Not that it matters, but Obama was for the Gas Tax Holiday before he was against it (three times!), and of course he too has said he would annihilate Iran under the same circumstances....

The more you know.

I hope you had a pleasant and safe travel.

[anne]

http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/the_hillary_metaphors.php

May 13, 2008

The Hillary Metaphors
By Matthew Yglesias

Excellent cartoon. * Not being a Clinton supporter myself, I obviously don't think all expressions of opposition to her presidential aspirations are driven by sexism. It is, however, extremely telling about the sort of society in which we live that hostility to her presidential aspirations so often finds expression through these sexist scripts.

* http://www.someguywithawebsite.com/cartoons/2008/080512_metaphors.html