Go to Original
The Republican Resurrection
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 23 March 2008
The day before Barack Obama gave The Speech, Hillary Clinton gave a big speech
of her own, billed by her campaign as a "major policy address on the war
in Iraq." What, you didn't hear about it?
Clinton partisans can blame the Obamaphilic press corps for underplaying their
candidate's uncompromising antiwar sentiments. But intentionally or not, the
press did Mrs. Clinton a favor. Every time she opens her mouth about Iraq, she
reminds voters of how she enabled the catastrophe that has devoured American
lives and treasure for five years.
Race has been America's transcendent issue far longer than that. I share the
general view that Mr. Obama's speech is the most remarkable utterance on the
subject by a public figure in modern memory. But what impressed me most was
not Mr. Obama's rhetorical elegance or his nuanced view of both America's undeniable
racial divide and equally undeniable racial progress. The real novelty was to
find a politician who didn't talk down to his audience but instead trusted it
to listen to complete, paragraph-long thoughts that couldn't be reduced to sound
bites.
In a political culture where even campaign debates can resemble "Jeopardy,"
this is tantamount to revolution. As if to prove the point, some of the Beltway
bloviators who had hyped Mitt Romney's instantly forgotten snake oil on "Faith
in America" soon fell to fretting about whether "ordinary Americans"
would comprehend Mr. Obama.
Mrs. Clinton is fond of mocking her adversary for offering "just words."
But words can matter, and Mrs. Clinton's tragedy is that she never realized
they could have mattered for her, too. You have to wonder if her Iraq speech
would have been greeted with the same shrug if she had tossed away her usual
talking points and seized the opportunity to address the war in the same adult
way that Mr. Obama addressed race. Mrs. Clinton might have reconnected with
the half of her party that has tuned her out.
She is no less bright than Mr. Obama and no less dedicated to public service.
It's not her fault that she doesn't have his verbal gifts - who does?
But her real problem isn't her speaking style. It's the content. Mrs. Clinton
needn't have Mr. Obama's poetry or pearly oratorical tones to deliver a game-changing
speech. She just needs the audacity of candor. Yet she seems incapable of revisiting
her history on Iraq (or much else) with the directness that Mr. Obama brought
to his reappraisal of his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
On Monday she once again pretended her own record didn't exist while misrepresenting
her opponent's. "I've been working day in and day out in the Senate to
provide leadership to end this war," she said, once more implying he's
all words and she's all action. But Mrs. Clinton didn't ratchet up her criticisms
of the war until she wrote a letter expressing her misgivings to her constituents
in late 2005, two and a half years after Shock and Awe. By then, she was not
leading but following - not just Mr. Obama, who publicly called for an
Iraq exit strategy a week before the release of her letter, but John Murtha,
the once-hawkish Pennsylvania congressman who called for a prompt withdrawal
a few days earlier still.
What if Mrs. Clinton had come clean Monday, admitting that she had made a mistake
in her original vote and highlighting her efforts to make amends since? John
Edwards, arguably a more strident proponent of invading Iraq in 2003 than Mrs.
Clinton, did exactly that also in the weeks before her 2005 letter. He succeeded
in lifting the cloud, even among those on the left of his party.
Instead Mrs. Clinton darkened that cloud by claiming that she was fooled by
the prewar intelligence that didn't dupe nearly half her Democratic Senate colleagues,
including Bob Graham, Teddy Kennedy and Carl Levin. Even worse, she repeatedly
pretends that she didn't know President Bush would regard a bill titled "Authorization
for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002" as an authorization
to go to war. No one believes this spin for the simple reason that no one believes
Mrs. Clinton is an idiot. Her patently bogus explanations for her vote have
in the end done far more damage to her credibility than the vote itself.
That she has never given a forthright speech on Iraq is what can happen when
your chief campaign strategist is a pollster. Focus groups no doubt say it would
be hara-kiri for her to admit such a failing. But surely many Americans would
have applauded her for confessing to mistakes and saying what she learned from
them. As her husband could have told her, that's best done sooner rather than
later.
It's too late now, and so the Democratic stars are rapidly aligning for disaster.
Mrs. Clinton is no longer trying to overcome Mr. Obama's lead in the popular
vote and among pledged delegates by making bold statements about Iraq or any
other issue. Instead of enhancing her own case for the presidency, she's going
to tear him down. As Adam Nagourney of The New York Times delicately put it
last week, she is "looking for some development to shake confidence in
Mr. Obama" so that she can win over superdelegates in covert 3 a.m. phone
calls. If Mr. Wright doesn't do it, she'll seek another weapon. Mr. Obama, who
is, after all, a politician and not a deity, could well respond in kind.
For Republicans, the prospect of marathon Democratic trench warfare is an Easter
miracle. Saddled with the legacy of both Iraq and a cratering economy, the G.O.P.
can only rejoice at its opponents' talent for self-destruction. The Republicans
can also count on the help of a political press that, whatever its supposed
tilt toward Mr. Obama, remains most benevolent toward John McCain.
This was strikingly apparent last week, when Mr. McCain's calamitous behavior
was relegated to sideshow status by many, if not most, news media. At a time
of serious peril for America, the G.O.P.'s presumptive presidential nominee
revealed himself to be alarmingly out of touch on both of the most pressing
issues roiling the country.
Never mind that Bear Stearns was disposed of in a fire sale, the dollar was
collapsing, job losses hit a five-year low, and the price of oil hit an all-time
high. Mr. McCain, arriving in Iraq, went AWOL on capitalism's meltdown, delegating
his economic adviser to release an anodyne two-sentence statement of confidence
in Ben Bernanke.
This is consistent with Mr. McCain's laissez-faire approach to economic matters.
In January he proposed tasking any problems to "a committee headed by Alan
Greenspan, whether he's alive or dead." This witty salvo must be very comforting
to the large share of Americans - the largest since the Great Depression
- who now owe more on their homes than they're worth.
In Iraq, Mr. McCain did not repeat his April 2007 mistake of touring a "safe"
market while protected by a small army. (CNN tried to revisit that market last
week, but the idea was vetoed as too risky by the network's security advisers.)
Instead he made a bigger mistake. As if to emulate Dick Cheney, who arrived
in Baghdad a day behind him, he embraced the vice president's habit of manufacturing
false links in the war on terror: Mr. McCain told reporters that Iran is training
Al Qaeda operatives and sending them into Iraq.
His Sancho Panza, Joe Lieberman, whispered in his ear that a correction was
in order. But this wasn't a one-time slip, like Gerald Ford's debate gaffe about
Poland in 1976. Mr. McCain has said this repeatedly. Troubling as it is that
he conflates Shiite Iran with Sunni terrorists, it's even more bizarre that
he doesn't acknowledge the identity of Iran's actual ally in Iraq - the
American-sponsored Shiite government led by Nuri al-Maliki. Only two weeks before
the Iraqi prime minister welcomed Mr. McCain to Baghdad, he played host to a
bubbly state visit by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Whatever Mrs. Clinton's or Mr. Obama's inconsistencies about how to wind down
the war, they are both models of coherence next to Mr. McCain. He keeps saying
the surge is a "success," but he can't explain why that success keeps
us trapped in Iraq indefinitely. He never says precisely what constitutes that
"victory" he keeps seeing around the corner. His repeated declaration
that he will only bring home the troops "with honor" is a Vietnam
acid flashback recycled as a non sequitur. Our troops have already piled up
more than enough honor in their five years of service under horrific circumstances.
Meanwhile, as Al Qaeda proliferates in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a survey by
Foreign Policy magazine of 3,400 active and retired American officers finds
that 88 percent believe that the Iraq war has "stretched the U.S. military
dangerously thin."
But as violence flares up again in Iraq and the American economy skids, the
issues consuming the Democrats are Mr. Wright and Geraldine Ferraro, race and
gender, unsanctioned primaries and unaccountable superdelegates. Unless Mr.
Obama and Mrs. Clinton find a way to come together for the good of their country
as well as their party, no speech by either of them may prevent Mr. McCain from
making his second unlikely resurrection in a single political year.
-------
Jump to today's Truthout Features:
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on TO may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.
Print This Story
E-mail This Story