I, like so many of Obama's supporters, embrace Obama's commitment to reengineer our political life. I don't view the past through rose colored glasses, I know that dirty tricks and fear and the politics of division have always been part of our political process. Karl Rove didn't invent mudslinging and smears and he wasn't the first to employ rhetoric to inflame our hatreds. Further, the rich and the well-connected have always enjoyed an advantage in politics. And while K Street lobbyists have inserted themselves deeper into the political processes than ever before, government has always been susceptible to the corrupting influence of money. Overturning all of this won't be easy. Yet we need to make a start, and Obama is the first presidential candidate positioned to make a serious effort.
Hillary Clinton is deeply implicated in the type of politics Obama seeks to reject. Obama's goal in the next seven weeks before the Pennsylvania primary should be to make clearer his vision of a renewed, responsive, and transparent political process. And he should throw a bright light on Hillary and illuminate the ways in which she is the very embodiment of what is wrong with American politics. This isn't "going negative," this is straight talk. This is an example of how we should, now and in the future, require politicians to be accountable for the choices they make. And this needs to be done, in a way consistent with the new politics we imagine, with an eye toward expanding the conversation, rather than as a way of marginalizing Hillary. The Clinton campaign consistently has sought to marginalize Obama, dismissing his appeal as cult-like, mocking his appeal to hope, and proposing that he has nothing to offer but words--to the point where Hillary now has been claiming, over and over, that his "entire campaign" is "based on one speech."
So where does Obama start? I would begin, as Obama has, with Hillary's support for the war in Iraq. She hasn't explained to any level of satisfaction why she voted to give George Bush the authority to invade Iraq. Reviewing her speech on the floor of the Senate when she chose to support Bush's rush to war, one sees all of the same justifications that the Bush White House used to justify their efforts to build a sustained push toward war. She uncritically swallowed the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, she believed the U.N. was a weak and ineffective organization (her words: "The United Nations is an organization that is still growing and maturing"), and she implied that failure to act would open us to the possibility of another attack like the one we experienced on September 11th. Further, and most bizarrely, she defended her vote because it expanded presidential power and prerogatives. This was, of course, one of the secret desires of the war's neocon architects, but even they weren't foolish enough to make that a central part of the conversation. Can you see Americans swallowing the deaths of thousands of American soldiers as a means to expand presidential powers?
In short, Obama's claim that Hillary aided and abetted Bush's inexorable march to war seems to have validity. She needs to answer this claim. Obama needs to shift focus: the issue isn't his opposition to the war (although he was right to oppose it), the concern is not Hillary's poor judgment (although she failed to question assumptions about the risk Iraq posed), the question is her role in reciting all of the very same claims the Bush administration was voicing. Her position now is that she wanted more inspections, that she wanted to pressure Saddam Hussein to comply, yet she was turning up the temperature, not appealing for calm. She was playing on our fears--of another attack on our homeland--and undermining the organization that had the best hope of manufacturing an agreement to observe and inspect Iraqi facilities and impose sanctions.
The other topic Obama needs to put on the table is the tri-polar relationship between Bill Clinton, Canadian mining tycoon Frank Giustra, and Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev. The New York Times covered this story in January, but it never developed any wider play. That doesn't mean there is nothing to explore. In brief, Bill Clinton arranged a meeting between Giustra, who was seeking a contract to extract Kazakhstan's uranium, and Nazarbayev, a dictator with an abhorrent human rights record. In the end, everyone got what they wanted. Clinton promoted Nazarbayev's candidacy to head the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, despite the Kazakhstan president's authoritarian record. Giustra got the contract to exploit Kazakhstan's uranium. And Clinton's foundation received a 31 million dollar donation from Giustra. Bill Clinton has said he will continue to fundraise for his foundation if Hillary wins the presidency. It is valid to ask: will this mean brokering more deals between dictators and those seeking favors from them? If it does, what are the implications for U.S. foreign policy? And, perhaps as important, what are the implications for Hillary Clinton's presidency? Will she be incapacitated by calls from Republican opponents for investigations into Bill Clinton's opportunistic friendships?
Hillary's claim is that she is better prepared than Obama to fight the Republican attack machine. Obama has been responding to this claim obliquely. In essence, he has said that he aims to improve politics, to make it about more than fisticuffs and name-calling. But Obama needs more than this. He needs to begin a conversation about Hillary's claim, and question whether she, perhaps through Bill's business dealings, is more susceptible to Republican attacks than he is.
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