What would Hillary have done?

As disappointed and disillusioned as I am with President Obama, I am uncomfortable with all the braying from disappointed liberals. I have not understood why liberals were so ready to undermine him, as if they did not realize that the Republican and, especially, the right wing relished their attacks. Now they are, some of them, saying that Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice, that she would have handled her presidency in a better fashion, would have negotiated and shown more spine, than Barack Obama.


Rather than reveling in these flights of reverse political fancy, I find myself wanting the revisionist Hillary fantasists — Clintonites and reformed Obamamaniacs alike — to just shut up already. I understand the impulse to indulge in a quick “I told you so.” I would be lying if I said I didn’t think it sometimes. Maybe often. But to say it — much less to bray it — is small, mean, divisive and frankly dishonest. None of us know what would have happened with Hillary Clinton as president, no matter how many rounds of W.W.H.H.D. (What Would Hillary Have Done) we play.

It is a kind of piling on that liberals are engaged in now that it is acceptable to admit that perhaps we made a wrong choice. It's too easy. It is almost as if they were confessing their sins in hope of purifying their souls, only waiting for someone to absolve them, tell them to recite I will not vote foolishly again two hundred times, and promise that everything will be better in the morning.

I believe she was better prepared to navigate the vast right wing of our political system? Yes, sir, that’s part of why I voted for her over Obama. Do I wonder if she might not also have taken us to war with Iran by now? Well, that’s part of why I almost voted for Obama over her.

Obama seemed the candidate of change, of hope for a different way of conducting ourselves in the world and of ending the trend toward greater and greater economic disparity at home. Clinton seemed a tired choice, and then there was Bubba.

The visions — in 2008, of Obama as a progressive redeemer who would restore enlightened democracy to our land and Hillary as a crypto-Republican company man; or, in 2011, of Obama as an appeasement-happy crypto-Republican and Hillary as a leftist John Wayne who would have whipped those Congressional outlaws into shape — they were all invented. These are fictional characters shaped by the predilections, prejudices and short memories of the media and the electorate.

Wailing and hoping they, we, had voted for Hillary and thus wound up with a President we would still be supporting fervently, who would have already closed Guantanamo and withdrawn our military forces from Afghanistan and Iraq, who would not have agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts, would have ended torture definitively ... it is pure fantasy.


If she had won her party’s nomination and then the general election, Hillary Clinton’s presidency would probably not have looked so different from Obama’s. You think Obama’s advisers are bad? Hillary Clinton hired, and then took far too long to get rid of, Mark Penn. And her economic team probably would have looked an awful lot like Obama’s.

Excellent point. Obama drew his administration from the Democratic establishment, and the prior Democratic president was Bill Clinton: Panetta and others. Would Hillary have ditched Bob Gates as Defense Secretary? They are false choices we imagine.

It’s just that her similarities to Obama never seemed to register with those who saw in our current president a progressivism that he himself wasn’t advertising, and saw in her a drive and ferocity that — far from being the salvation some are now imagining — made her a harpy, a monster and a bitch. Her storied toughness was then read as craven ambition that was going to tear her party apart. Her knowledge of how Congress works was seen as part of her dynastic and corrupt Beltway privilege.

I certainly felt that she did not deserve to be the nominee ; I hated the idea that Bubba would be back in the White House, in any capacity.

Barack Obama walked into the White House in January 2009 with his own set of structural and strategic challenges: an economy in free fall; a 24-hour cable-news and talk-radio-fed culture eager to blare “crisis!” headlines every 12 minutes, making long-view evaluations of a presidency impossible; and most important, an obstinate Congress. On every major vote, from the stimulus to uncompromised health care reform, Obama needed 60 (not the historically customary 50) to get anything moving, a practical impossibility, thanks both to Republicans, whose stated goal was not to fix things but to keep the president from fixing anything, and to conservative Democrats, who made the party’s majority a false promise to begin with.

Yes, quite very true, but he wanted the job, just as she did. And his strategic and tactical choices were bad ones: let Congress hash out legislation out in the open, get only marginally involved during the legislative process, and wait for the end of the process to step in and close the deal. And go for health care first. Still, the Republican campaign to destroy his presidency, even if it damaged the country (in effect, especially if it damaged the country, for then they could really blaming for screwing up), and their ability to prevent any defections, hurt him badly. But his inability to overcome such intransigence is a key part of his defeats.