Bill Clinton: Reliving History

I don’t like to comment on partisan politics much. I used to. As I say in my ‘About’ page, once I figured out that Republicans and Democrats were more or less equally hypocritical, I hit the road, and have essentially been looking for a different kind of institution and a different channel for my life ambitions ever since. Currency trading works well enough, because there’s a lot of political game theory involved.

However, there is one tranche of the hypocrisy market–and judging by Americans’ willful ignorance about world affairs and eagerness to erase bad memories, it’s still a huge bull market, with no signs of a top–which happens to be (almost) completely cornered by the Democrats. It’s also the only kind of hypocrisy that still makes me genuinely angry, so apologies to any capital-D Democratic readers for not being even-handedly vitriolic.

That’s when a politician who, after inserting his requisitely absolving lawyerly exceptions and opt-out clauses before the vote, enthusiastically voted for the Iraq war five years ago, has since shifted with the political wind, and now fabricates a history of vociferous opposition to the war where none existed.

If you are Russ Feingold, Barack Obama, or anybody else who publicly opposed the war then, you can say whatever you want about Iraq as far as I’m concerned. But if you voted for the war, and then your base became really unhappy, you cannot back out. You are not entitled to get your ante back just because your team wasn’t dealt pocket aces. Nor are you entitled to get your ante back if you were dealt 7-2 offsuit. Whatever your initial read on the situation, you are in the hand until you win, or until you lose. The Democrats who have since invented excuses to vociferously oppose the war after previously voting for it, because it didn’t go perfectly according to plan (guess what: wars never go according to plan), because Bush sucks, because there weren’t enough negotiations — they are guilty of treason. As is Gordon Smith.
If you authorize a war, you are in it until it’s over. If you believe, before the rest of the authorizers, that the war was misguided and should be wound down, you cannot say so publicly until your group has reached an internal consensus to that effect, because to break and go public undermines the majority with whom you voted. The authorizers who have had second thoughts, precisely in line with shifting political winds, refuse to accept the burden of their own responsibility. If the war was “criminal,” as Gordon Smith suddenly realized about 20 months before the date of his Oregon Senate reelection, Smith is a criminal accomplice, not a victim. Ignorance is no excuse.

Authorizing a war is a long-term investment in a totally illiquid asset. Liquidating early carries an enormous cost for the others on your side of the transaction in the form of a longer war, more dead soldiers, more GDP chewed up in the bowels of the Pentagon, and perpetually irresponsible American political institutions.

It is commensurately profitable to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has the luxury of jailing or killing anyone who tries to take his chips and back out from the Iranians’ side of the poker game.

Like America’s Too Big To Take Responsibility Fail banking institutions, the Clintons made what turned out to be a very bad (for them) leveraged, illiquid investment. They are rewriting their balance sheet, with the eager assistance of Drudge and the alphabet-soup media dinosaurs, and kicking the liability down the road for somebody else to pay. In this case, the US Army and the US taxpayer. The liability is already much bigger than it had to be, and it will balloon still higher.

There are no unpaid debts at the poker table of international power politics. Unfortunately, the Democratic base inhabits an alternate reality in which Bush and his lieutenants carry sole responsibility for every cost of the war, random Iraqi behavior carries responsibility for every success, John Edwards, who once shared liability for the Iraq war, is now a champion of the antiwar movement [*], Hillary Clinton was pretty much antiwar all along but just a little ambivalent about it, and Barack Obama is secretly a hawk who just said he was antiwar because he represented a super-liberal all-black district, and by the way, he’s naive and inexperienced and not ready for prime time.

Unfortunately, as rabidly aimless Democrats are just now figuring out, John Edwards is just not It. That leaves Clinton, alongside Obama, who while green is no proven hypocrite. (Just give him time.)

“Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying memory?” he explained.

The Clintons’/ Hillary’s war vote has never stopped haunting them. Apparently, Bill is getting uncomfortable with his wife’s Iowa numbers, and is alarmed by the potentially fatal “underdog Iowa slingshot.” It made Kerry in 2004, after all. Perfectly on cue with the 2004 race, Bill has officially taken over the Hillary campaign’s job of haphazardly rewriting the Clinton Legacy with regards to Iraq. As Ron Fournier says:

DES MOINES, Iowa - As only he can do, Bill Clinton packed campaign venues across eastern Iowa and awed Democratic voters with a compelling case for his wife’s candidacy. He was unscripted, in-depth and generous.

“Good Bill” and “Bad Bill” (his nickname among some aides) returned to the public arena Tuesday as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton brandished her double-edged sword of a husband to fend off rivals in the Jan. 3 caucus fight.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Clinton told 400 Iowans at the start of his three-city swing, “I have had a great couple of days out working for Hillary.”

In the next 10 minutes, he used the word “I” a total of 94 times and mentioned “Hillary” just seven times in an address that was as much about his legacy as it was about his wife’s candidacy.

He told the crowd where he bought coffee that morning and where he ate breakfast.

He detailed his Thanksgiving Day guest list, and menu.

He defended his record as president, rewriting history along the way.

And he explained why his endorsement of a certain senator from New York should matter to people.

“I know what it takes to be president,” he said, “and because of the life I’ve led since I’ve left office.”

I, me and my. Oh, my.

Late in his 50-minute address, Clinton told the crowd that wealthy people like he and his wife should pay more taxes in times of war. “Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers,” he said. …

If the former president secretly opposed the war but did not want to speak against a sitting president (as some of his aides now claim), what moral authority does he have now? And did he share his objections with his wife? She started out as a hawkish Democrat but is now appealing to anti-war voters.

… He had four big reasons why Democrats should back her:

• She has the best policy plans;

• She works well with Republicans;

• She’s a problem solver;

• And she has the best range of experience.

For each of those reasons, he had a half dozen or so facts, anecdotes or arguments to support them — and each of those categories had several bullet points of their own.

Clinton navigated this mental outline with the same rhetorical crutches he used in Arkansas and Washington.

He would mention something in passing and promise to get back to it (”I’ll say more about that in a minute”), and he always did.

He would “show” people what he meant rather than just “tell” them (”I’ll give you just one example,” he said before giving two or three).

He gave any impatient crowd members hope that the speech would soon end (”And, finally, let me say … ,” he said at least twice before launching into another topic).

What he left the crowds with was the assurance that his wife understands their plight. For a man who convinced so many voters that he felt their pain, this may be his most powerful calling card Clinton can leave to Iowa crowds and his wife.

“You need somebody who is strong, competent and has good vision, and never forgets what it’s like to be you,” Clinton said.

And, no, he wasn’t talking about himself. Ding ding ding!

On the one hand, I’d say that a majority of the smartest people I’ve ever met have been Democrats. On the other hand, the Democratic base has always preferred to rewrite its collective memory–Edwards, Kerry, the Clintons, half the Democrats in the Senate, a slew in the House–over the pain of admitting their own mistakes (or at least punishing the mistakes of their party leadership) every single time. Saying “I’m sorry” is close enough to, “It never happened,” as far as Democrats are concerned.

My guess is that the Clintons will get away with the two-step pretty easily. If the Democratic base had vertebrae as well as common sense, their own media would be flogging the Clintons every day for the consequences. With few exceptions, that hasn’t happened. The alphabet soups and Drudge want some semblance of a race just because it’s good for business, but they can be counted upon to provide another “Pakistan gaffe” come clutch time. (I am still reeling at how effective that was.)

I did, after all, get this story straight off of Drudge, as I did the inconvenient truth of Clinton’s war support. But a Clinton flunky is in contact with Drudge all the time, and the only reason Drudge is doing this is because he’s alarmed by the falling interest in the race based on his click count. Drudge is in Hillary’s corner, at least as far as the Democratic nomination is concerned.

If you’re a conservative, it’s a pretty sweet deal, in a nearsighted way. Democratic activists saddle themselves with serially irresponsible leaders who can’t stomach being blamed for anything. (Not that the Republicans aren’t irresponsible, but the GOP can take blame for something without the entire leadership panicking and crashing to the exits.) As a result, Democratic voters always fulminate after the fact at their leaders’ risk aversion and resulting policy failures, only to walk off the same cliff four years later.

If the Democrats punished their leaders commensurate with their leaders’ respective mistakes, politics would be fun again. Until then Pinocchio will lead the Democrats by the nose, I will trade currencies, and pathetically spineless “leadership” will continue to plague the Democratic Party.

[*] Yes, he regrets it now. Too bad. He voted for it, and he only undermines the effort, and tries to make other parties pay for an alleged mistake which was partly his own, by backing out of his vote.