Did I just endorse Clinton?

Age becomes her, too. The face of somebody who doesn't stop learning. Via US News.

BooMan and Steve M are both calling our attention to Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone bemoaning his boss's decision to endorse Hillary Clinton's candidacy for the presidency, in disregard, Taibbi thinks, of the magazine's usual commitment to "championing the 'youth vote'" (Taibbi's interior scare quotes there). BooMan is all

I'd rather walk on glass than write a point-by-point rebuttal.... But that's exactly what's required. It's required not because Taibbi's argument isn't mostly supportable and well made. It's just that his telling of the history is so consistently one-sided that it cumulatively amounts to a bad distortion of the facts. It's a lawyer's case rather than the synthesis of both the prosecution and the defense. A jury really should hear both.

I don't even think it's that well made. It's certainly propaganda, though.

I can't blame Boo for not trying, really. It's horribly dispiriting work. That's partly in the nature of the brief for the defense, that it's intrinsically defensive. You're not making the positive statement ,"My client, ladies and gentlemen, is awesome!" but the negative statement, "However bad it looks, she didn't do it," and there's no way to feel really good about that. And then Boo just hasn't ever really learned to like her much.

Which is not exactly my problem. I've liked her a lot, off and on, over the years, especially when Republicans were attacking her, which was of course ceaselessly. I liked the cookie-baking comment and the health care plan and the Suha Arafat embrace. As a New Yorker, I very much liked her "listening campaign" in the 2000 senatorial campaign (she's doing some of that again this season but the media are refusing to know about it), and the way she set about learning how to be a good senator after the election, with such quiet, keep-your-head-down diligence. I've never confused her with Bill Clinton (they're only related by marriage, you know), who has strengths and weaknesses of his own. I'd have voted for her over Obama in the 2008 contest if she'd only apologized for that AUMF vote (as she now has), because I thought she was generally more progressive than he was, as well as being more progressive than Bill from the start of her Senate career, and less beholden to the bankers than either of them.

I was right, too! But I wasn't right to think that she would have been as fine a president as Obama has been, because that's not about how far left-or-right you are (Buckley's dictum, that Republicans should choose their candidates on that simple one-dimensional algorithmic standard, taking the most conservative one that is electable, is a bizarrely primitive-minded way of doing things and not something Democrats should want to emulate) but things like knowledge, technique, intellect and forcefulness, and security in one's skin, and because Obama has turned into a miraculous president, the best since FDR (who also looked pretty foolishly conservative at one time in his career, preaching the balanced budget up and down the devastated country in the 1932 campaign).

Speaking of the 2008 contest, there's something extremely interesting in Taibbi's essay relating to that. Or rather what's interesting is something that isn't there—there's a lot of concern for what we have learned or ought to have learned from the campaign of 1972,  or 1992 and 1996, or even (very briefly) 1984, but no reference whatever to the campaigns our young voters have the most personal knowledge and experience of, in 2008 and 2012, or to the name Barack Obama. Not one.

Not that I think Taibbi did this on purpose, or even thought about it particularly, but it's interesting, and it says something about the way he's working here. It's almost like the way conservatives have been making their argument leaving out the name of George W. Bush, whose catastrophic terribleness proves they were wrong. For your progressive-dudebro caucus, there's a similar embarrassment in the way Obama has showed that a transactional approach can bring transformative results.

Thus Taibbi, speaking of the Bill Clinton administration:

The new Democratic version of idealism came in a package called "transactional politics." It was about getting the best deal possible given the political realities, which we were led to believe were hopelessly stacked against the hopes and dreams of the young.

Which is reasonably true; but he doesn't mention the other half of the dichotomy, what the concept is opposed to in its normal usage, the idea of a "transformational politics", the transfiguration of society worked by a charismatic figure who turns us all into different people, like Woodrow Wilson making the world safe for democracy, or Lenin or Robespierre for that matter. Actually it was a pretty idiotic idea, wasn't it?

As we might have learned from the experience of Roosevelt and Johnson, two other presidents Taibbi doesn't mention, transactions are the technique through which society is transformed. It was a huge lament on the part of the panditry from maybe 2010 through 2014 how the transformational candidate Obama, with his soaring speeches, had turned into a transactional president, but now we're locked in an international agreement to halt global warming and seeing ourselves on the road to universal health care and the road out of perpetual war in the Middle East, in a multipolar world where the US does not have to serve as the lonely policeman, talking about free early childhood and tertiary education, establishing rights for the disadvantaged identities, and beginning the agonizing conversation on race that our country has been desperately needing for a century and a half. And effectively destroying the wicked old Republican party. We have been, in point of fact, turned into a new country.

And Clinton, with her own skill set, is exceptionally well suited to succeed him, a Taft to Obama's Teddy Roosevelt, as I was suggesting earlier, or more grandly a Grant to his Lincoln (Grant used to be sniffed at, with his nasty friends, as not quite gentlemanly by most historians, perhaps as an effect of their bias in favor of the South, but it's now clear that his work on Reconstruction makes him among the best of his century). In part because of that very transactionality, her ability to listen, her willingness to study really hard and get dirty in the details. Also I like her program, in health care, education, finance regulation, not because I want to sacrifice ideals for achievability but because I think they'll get better results in all cases, but I'll be talking about that elsewhere. Good gracious, I think I just endorsed her!

You want the point-by-point? OK, if I have to. There's actually not much.

1. the 2002 Senate vote on the AUMF

In which Senator Clinton voted to authorize President Bush to deploy military force in Iraq, along with Kerry, Dodd, Biden (chairman of the foreign relations committee and a mentor to Clinton), and Edwards, i.e. any Democrat who was thinking about running for president, and she was the last of the five to recognize it was wrong. OK, (a) the bill still would have won overwhelmingly if all of them had joined their braver colleagues Kennedy and Byrd and Boxer and so on, it was 77-23; (b) as Fred Kaplan wrote just this February, the reason she has given for the vote ("I take the president at his word that he will try hard to pass a United Nations resolution and seek to avoid war, if possible," she said in Congress, and it's still hard to believe we had a president who lied about that the way Bush did, for more criminal and immoral to my mind than any of Nixon's crimes) is completely true, not "ridiculous excuses"; and (c) we already punished her seven years ago, I showed up for that and I'm satisfied.

2. the 1994 Bill Clinton crime bill

Take the mass incarceration phenomenon. This was pioneered in Mario Cuomo's New York and furthered under Bill Clinton's presidency, which authorized more than $16 billion for new prisons and more police in a crime bill.

It started in Nelson Rockefeller's New York, in 1973, with the draconian drug sentencing laws of that year; Cuomo would have repealed them if he could and said so—his contribution was, ten years later, to build prisons to reduce the inhumanity of the conditions in which the offenders were warehoused (and provide jobs for upstate New Yorkers).

Rep. Bernard Sanders (I-VT) voted for the 1994 bill, as did Barney Frank, Henry Waxman, Bobby Rush, Ed Towns, Carrie Meek, and many other progressive voices; it was seen as a mainly Democratic bill, and only a few Democrats (11 of the 34 members of the Congressional Black Caucus including John Lewis, and among white representatives my own Jerry Nadler) had the prescience and integrity to vote against it. Hillary Clinton, who lived in the White House but held no elective office, did not vote; if she used the word "superpredator", which is pretty disgusting, I regret that, but I'm sure she hasn't used it too often in the 23 years since.

Everybody including Bill Clinton now agrees that it was a terrible thing, but who has done something about it at the federal level is Barack Obama, working as always around the immovable opposition of the congressional Republicans. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both agree to continue what Obama started and if there is some reason why this is an issue between them at all Taibbi does not reveal what it is. (The Sanders program on the drug war, decriminalizing marijuana at the federal level and supporting more treatment and less incarceration for drug addicts, does seem preferable to Clinton, but she may be "evolving" in a better direction from where she started, and it's kind of moot as the feds shut down their anti-marijuana activities altogether in the face of state law changes. Update: maybe evolving <a href="http://miami.cbslocal.com/2016/03/26/hillary-clinton-talks-ufos-marijuana-with-jimmy-kimmel/#.Vvf45_fDUpk.twitter">quite a bit faster than I imagined</a>.)

3. Trade protection

Trade? From NAFTA to the TPP, Hillary and her party cohorts have consistently supported these anti-union free trade agreements, until it became politically inexpedient.

Hahaha, consistency is the last thing you can accuse her of. The number of times she's changed her position on NAFTA is anywhere from one to three or four times, depending on what evidence you accept. As senator, she voted against the Andean Trade Preference Act in 2002 and CAFTA in 2005, but for bilateral agreements with Oman, Chile, and Singapore, while criticizing their language on labor standards. As secretary of state, supporting TPP and (I think) the TTIP was part of her job, and she would have had to resign if she couldn't do it, but her opposition to these deals started only last summer, and clearly have something to do with AFL-CIO endorsement. To me her flexibility is a plus, though it doesn't show a lot of principle, because I believe trade agreements can be valuable (I agree with Krugman that TPP is not very important, but I actually favor—please don't hate me!—the provisions I've studied a bit, on labor enforcement, environment, and ISDS). Sanders has demonstrated consistency in words and deeds, taking pride in never supporting one throughout his career, and I think that's dumb.

4. Bankruptcy

Hillary infamously voted for regressive bankruptcy reform just a few years after privately meeting with Elizabeth Warren and agreeing that such industry-driven efforts to choke off debt relief needed to be stopped.

After her celebrated meeting with Elizabeth Warren, when she was First Lady, she persuaded her husband to veto the noxious bill; as a new senator in 2001 she voted for a similar bill, after pushing her committee to introduce important protections for women and children, but the bill didn't go anywhere because of opposition in the House; in 2005 she announced opposition to yet another version but couldn't vote when Bill Clinton was hospitalized. Here Taibbi trips over the line from stupidity to lying.

5. Speaking fees

Then of course there is the matter of the great gobs of money Hillary has taken to give speeches to Goldman Sachs and God knows whom else.

Why, Matt, I didn't know you were a religious fellow! But you don't need to ask God, as humans are aware of these things, and her audiences include not just vampire squids but all sorts of fascinating marine life, including The American Camping Association Atlantic City ($260,000), eBay in San Jose ($315,000), the Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women ($225,500), and so on, not to neglect the Beth El Synagogue of Minneapolis ($225,000) and the Economic Club of Grand Rapids ($225,000). Trigger warning: It's pretty disgusting, actually, but probably not corrupt in any of the obvious senses. And incidentally Matt's in the business too, represented by the Lavin Bureau; he will gladly address your group on the subjects of The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap or Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America. I don't think you can find out what his fees are unless you have a serious request, though. As Ira Gershwin failed to write, "Nice work if you can get it, and Tom Friedman can get it so it's not like you have to have any talent or anything."

6. That email thingy, whatever it is?

It makes me nervous to see Hillary supporters like law professor Stephen Vladeck arguing in the New York Times that the real problem wasn't anything Hillary did, but that the Espionage Act isn't "practical." If you're willing to extend the "purity" argument to the Espionage Act, it's only a matter of time before you get in real trouble. And even if it doesn't happen this summer, Democrats may soon wish they'd picked the frumpy senator from Vermont....

That last link is to a piece of slime from January by Jim Geraghty at NRO using Virginia anti-sex crusader Ken Cuccinelli as a source. It's obviously bullshit and shouldn't appear in a respectable publication like Rolling Stone.

If that's all you've got...

More from confessed neoliberal sellout Kevin Drum at Mother Jones.