If liberals want their policy preferences respected they should work to get more people in the presidential race.
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Peter Beinart recently wrote a piece explaining why he hopes that Vice President Joe Biden runs for president. In Beinart’s view Democrats are in need of a healthy debate over foreign policy. And Hillary, with her past support of foreign adventures and intervention, and Biden, who has embraced a more cautious approach since 2008, are the perfect ones to have such a debate. As Beinart puts it:
It would be a good thing for Democrats, and the country, if the private debate between Biden and Clinton went public. Otherwise, it’s likely that during the campaign Clinton will take stances more hawkish than Obama’s—partly because Ukraine has made hawkishness fashionable again and partly because that’s where her own instincts lie—but barely anyone will notice.
Beinart is hitting on an important point here. Democrats, and especially liberals, should want people other than Hillary Clinton to run for president. But it’s not that important that Joe Biden, or anyone else, be one of those people.
Politicians in general and presidential aspirants in particular hate being constrained in their future actions. They’d rather be free in the future to be able to take any action that they deem appropriate. Taking public positions in a campaign are very much a constraint on the future political behavior of any politician, presidents especially so. And thus the presidential nominations contest is very much elaborate ritual between candidates who don’t want to make promises that can haunt them later and party aligned interest groups that want to get prominent promises to on the issues they care about. So when there is only one major candidate is in the race that frontrunner can get away with vague platitudes like “freedom is good.” After all, interest groups have nobody else to turn to. But when there are many candidates you have to roll out elaborate policy plans in public, which makes them a lot harder to shelve if you get elected.
Which is why the state of the Democratic invisible primary should be kind of disheartening to liberals. Hillary continues to rack up big wins and only a few people like Joe Biden and Martin O’Malley seem likely to contest it. If you are a fan of Hillary and or don’t care about policy much this isn’t a problem. But if you’re a liberal who cares about specific issues you should be worried that she could just clear the field, run unopposed (or only marginally opposed) and get by with stories about how great the 90’s were.
One of the political hallmarks of the Obama age has been volume and intensity of liberals complaints about Obama. Ta-Nehisi Coates even went so far as to label his own disappointment that President Obama has never endorsed race specific policies as a remedy to the cruel injustices of America as being “The Death of Dreams.” I’d call it “the death of fantasies.” After all when did Obama ever promise to endorse race based public policy? At what campaign rally? During which debate? If he never did, and I’ve never been able to find a record of him doing so, it was probably kind of foolish to assume that he’d automatically support your idea. Indeed it’s probably smarter to assume he’d behave like the centrist Democrat he’s always been.
And this critique applies to some of the biggest liberal complaints from the Obama years. Liberals love to criticize Obamacare for lacking a public option and being worse than a single payer system, but where were all these people during the nominations process? I remember lots of questions about health care, but not many about public options or single payer. Other liberals love to criticize Obama’s lack of adherence to Keynesian principles when it comes to the economy, but why again would you assume that Obama would automatically back your ideas for a bigger stimulus? A list citing these disappointments that were ignored during the nominations process could go on for pages. Some of this is due to the fact that so many problems emerged after the primaries and caucuses were over, but then again maybe liberals should have focused on stuff other than Hillary Clinton’s Iraq War vote.
If liberals want their policy preferences respected by future presidents they can’t wait until after Election Day before making them known. The time for influencing the future of the Democratic Party and Democratic Presidents is right now, but unfortunately liberals don’t seem very interested in exercising this influence. Which is a recipe for their future disappointment.
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Aren’t you assuming that there is some kind of monolithic “liberalism’ , a set of cast-in-stone policy positions that ‘Real Liberals’ can’t deviate from? And I’m guessing that you think those ‘Real Liberal’ policy positions are identical to your own?
I don’t know where you came up with that. The big point here is that the time to influence potential presidents is before they win the nomination, after that party actors don’t have much influence. Hence why we got a health care law very similar to what Obama/Hillary/Edwards talked about on the campaign trail and why we left Iraq. But since liberals never got promises about drone or stimulus or any number of other things they have a lot less influence over Obama on those issues. This is true for conservatives as well. If you want a hypothetical president to… Read more »
Hillary is just as much a sociopath as her husband. They both despise anything not under their control and assume they know what is best for the “little people.”