Tag: Politics

The past was prologue

It’s amazing the way the media have gone from “Obama can do no wrong” to “Obama can do nothing right” following his defeats in Texas and Ohio last week.

The subject deserves a longer essay with links, but for the moment let me make a brief observation. After Super Tuesday, most political observers conceded that Clinton might lose every state until March 4, when Texas and Ohio would bail her out. That’s exactly what happened. Save for a brief, within-the-margin-of-error blip in Texas during the last week of February, she never relinquished her lead in either state.

What happened in Texas and Ohio wasn’t a reversal of fortune, a comeback, or “buyer’s remorse” on the part of Democrats having second thoughts about Obama. It was about Clinton winning two states she had always led in. (And Rhode Island made three.)

A number of observers have rightly called this the “anti-momentum” campaign. But the media, continually getting caught up in the moment, lose sight of that. Over and over.

What Power means by “monstrous”

Samantha Power has just resigned as Barack Obama’s chief foreign-policy adviser after intemperately referring to Hillary Clinton as a “monster” in an interview with the Scotsman. She was thought to be on the fast track to a top job in an Obama White House, should such a thing come to pass. Perhaps, after a suitable period of rehabilitation, she still may be.

Power did the right thing in quitting. The purpose of this post is to offer a little perspective on why she might think the Clintons are monstrous. In September 2001, the Atlantic Monthly published a long article by Power titled “Bystanders to Genocide,” in which she criticized the Clinton administration for its inaction in the slaughter of 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994.

Here’s an excerpt that will give you some idea of Power’s take on the Clinton team’s behavior:

In March of 1998, on a visit to Rwanda, President Clinton issued what would later be known as the “Clinton apology,” which was actually a carefully hedged acknowledgment. He spoke to the crowd assembled on the tarmac at Kigali Airport: “We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred” in Rwanda.

This implied that the United States had done a good deal but not quite enough. In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term “genocide,” for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing “to try to limit what occurred.” Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.

With the grace of one grown practiced at public remorse, the President gripped the lectern with both hands and looked across the dais at the Rwandan officials and survivors who surrounded him. Making eye contact and shaking his head, he explained, “It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate [pause] the depth [pause] and the speed [pause] with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”

Clinton chose his words with characteristic care. It was true that although top U.S. officials could not help knowing the basic facts — thousands of Rwandans were dying every day — that were being reported in the morning papers, many did not “fully appreciate” the meaning. In the first three weeks of the genocide the most influential American policymakers portrayed (and, they insist, perceived) the deaths not as atrocities or the components and symptoms of genocide but as wartime “casualties”—the deaths of combatants or those caught between them in a civil war.

Yet this formulation avoids the critical issue of whether Clinton and his close advisers might reasonably have been expected to “fully appreciate” the true dimensions and nature of the massacres. During the first three days of the killings U.S. diplomats in Rwanda reported back to Washington that well-armed extremists were intent on eliminating the Tutsi. And the American press spoke of the door-to-door hunting of unarmed civilians. By the end of the second week informed nongovernmental groups had already begun to call on the Administration to use the term “genocide,” causing diplomats and lawyers at the State Department to begin debating the word’s applicability soon thereafter. In order not to appreciate that genocide or something close to it was under way, U.S. officials had to ignore public reports and internal intelligence and debate.

Power continues, “The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen.”

Nevertheless, Power’s research clearly convinced her that not only could the White House have done much more to stop the killing, as Clinton himself acknowledged; but also that the administration knew much more than Clinton has ever acknowledged, and that top officials — including the president — chose, for the most part, to look the other way.

Here is an interview I conducted with Power for the Boston Phoenix in 2003 on the future of Iraq.

Photo (cc) by the Barack Obama campaign, and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Here’s how Clinton could win

If Hillary Clinton is to have any chance at all of winning the Democratic presidential nomination, she’s going to have to make a strong moral claim. By the time the primaries and caucuses are over, Barack Obama is almost certainly going to have won more pledged delegates and more states.

Clinton’s possible arguments — that she’s done better in traditionally Democratic big states like New York and California, or that the unpledged superdelegates should slide her way because she’s somehow more electable — aren’t going to cut it. That’s a profoundly undemocratic case, and the Obama delegates (not to mention general-election voters) would react with revulsion.

But there is one unlikely possibility: she could wind up winning the nationwide popular vote. If that were to happen, then it would be the Obama campaign suddenly having to talk about delegate counts and party rules, the very sort of inside baseball that turns voters off.

Could it happen? Take a look at last night’s results. Clinton succeeded in slicing quite a bit off Obama’s lead in the popular vote. According to the numbers, Clinton picked up 328,589 votes in winning three of the four primary states. The lion’s share — 227,556 — came from Ohio, where she won a decisive victory.

According to Real Clear Politics, Obama as of this morning has won 12,946,615 votes and Clinton 12,363,897 votes, not counting Florida — which shouldn’t count given that a party-rules squabble prevented both candidates from campaigning there. That gives Obama 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent for Clinton, or a margin of 582,718 votes. It also means that Obama lost a whopping 36 percent of his popular-vote lead yesterday.

When you look at the calendar, you can see that it’s going to be very difficult for Clinton to pass Obama in the popular vote unless she starts winning by large margins everywhere. The next big prize is Pennsylvania, which doesn’t vote until April 22.

But let’s say Obama and Clinton go into the convention with Obama ahead in delegates, but with neither having won enough to clinch — a very likely scenario. If Clinton has somehow built a lead in the popular vote, no matter how narrow, Obama’s margin among pledged delegates starts to look like the Electoral College: an undemocratic vestige of a bygone era.

And, at that point, the superdelegates, impressed by Clinton’s rather startling comeback, could award the nomination to her on the grounds that they were merely following the will of the people.

File photo (cc) by Daniella Zalcman and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Clinton won, but can she win?

In my latest for the Guardian, I ponder what’s next for Hillary Clinton and the media. She had a big day yesterday, and thus she can claim some momentum as well. But given that Barack Obama’s delegate lead appears to be insurmountable, where does she go from here? And how will the media redefine the narrative?

And Mondale and LBJ, too!

Scott Helman, writing in the Boston Globe, finds striking parallels between Hillary Clinton’s “red phone” ad and one used by Walter Mondale against Gary Hart in 1984. The non-missing link: Roy Spence, who worked for Mondale 24 years ago and is with Clinton now.

Over in TPM Land, Greg Sargent reports that Clinton honcho Mark Penn was asked whether the ad was based on Lyndon Johnson’s infamous 1964 ad, which exploited fears of Barry Goldwater by depicting a daisy-picking girl followed by a nuclear explosion. Not quite sure I see that, but there you go.

You’ve probably seen Obama’s response ad by now. But I’ll bet you haven’t seen this.

It’s over

I thought Clinton sounded sad and subdued at the end, as though she knew that whatever she needed to do tonight she didn’t do. If she’s going to get back into the race, it won’t be because of this debate.

A further thought on the Louis Farrakhan reject/denounce exchange. Russert really let Obama off the hook by not forcing him to answer for things his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has said. Yes, Russert noted that Wright has praised Farrakhan, but then he let it pass. Obama “rejected and denounced” Farrakhan, but we never got back to Wright.

To be sure, Obama needn’t endorse everything Wright says to belong to his church. But it would have made for a more interesting conversation than simply beating up on an easy target like Farrakhan.