Lakoff today in Huffpost:
This nomination campaign is about much more than the candidates. It about a major split within the Democratic party. The candidates are reflecting that split. Here are three of the major "issues" dividing Democrats.
First, triangulation: moving to the right — adopting right-wing positions — to get more votes. Bill Clinton did it and Hillary believes in it. It is what she means by "bipartisanship." Obama means the opposite by "bipartisanship." To Obama, it is a recognition that central progressive moral principles are fundamental American principles. For him, bipartisanship means finding people who call themselves "conservatives" or "independents," but who share those central American values with progressives. Obama thus doesn’t have to surrender or dilute his principles for the sake of "bipartisanship."
The second is incrementalism: Hillary believes in getting lots of small carefully crafted policies through, one at a time, step by small step, real but almost unnoticed. Obama believes in bold moves and the building of a movement in which the bold moves are demanded by the people and celebrated when they happen. This is the reason why Hillary talks about "I," I," "I" (the crafter of the policy) and Obama talks about "you" and "we" (the people who demand it and who jointly carry it out).
The third is interest group politics: Hillary looks at politics through interests and interest groups, seeking policies that satisfy the interests of such groups. Obama’s thinking emphasizes empathy over interest groups. He also sees empathy as central to the very idea of America. The result is a positive politics grounded in empathy and caring that is also patriotic and uplifting.
For a great many Democrats, these are the real issues. These real differences between the candidates reflect real differences within the party.
That brings some clarity to what I’ve been vaguely describing as differences between the candidates in their leadership style. It’s not about Hillary’s personality or her stand on a particular issue. It’s about her whole approach. Some say she’s a fighter, but her record points to her being a split-the-difference compromiser. And as we’ve seen time and time again, the Dems and the country are losers when it comes to bargaining with the hardline right. Clinton accepts the basic terms of the game as they exist; Obama does not. Sure, he’s had to play the game on the terms that existed when he came into it, but his goal now is to change the game. That’s what transformational politics means. If being a realist means accepting the game as it is currently played, we don’t need that kind of realism anymore.
So when the Hillary-supporting Kennedys write . . .
While talk of unity and compromise are inspiring to a nation wary of divisiveness, America stands at a historic crossroads where real issues divide our political landscapes. Democrats believe that America should not be torturing people, eavesdropping on our citizens or imprisoning them without habeas corpus or other constitutional rights. We should not be an imperial power. We need healthcare for all and a clean, safe environment.
The loftiest poetry will not solve these issues. We need a president willing to engage in a fistfight to safeguard and restore our national virtues.
. . . it shows that they really don’t get it. And then you have to question whether Clinton will really fight, as they say, or whether she’s more likely to triangulate and compromise. But even if she wants to fight, she will lose. This is a losing mentality.
Frank Rich makes the point:
In what she advertises as 35 years of fighting for Americans, Mrs. Clinton can point to some battles won. But many of them were political campaigns for Bill Clinton: seven even before his 1992 presidential run. The fistfighting required if she is president may also often be political. As Mrs. Clinton herself says, she has been in marathon combat against the Republican attack machine. Its antipathy will be increased exponentially by the co-president who would return to the White House with her on Day One.
It’s legitimate to wonder whether sweeping policy change can be accomplished on that polarized a battlefield. A Clinton presidency may end up a Democratic mirror image of Karl Rove’s truculent style of G.O.P. governance: a 50 percent plus 1 majority. Seven years on, that formula has accomplished little for the country beyond extending and compounding the mistake of invading Iraq.
I have no doubt Clinton sincerely thinks Obama is all smoke and mirrors while she is the candidate of substance, and most of the people who support Clinton probably see her and Obama the same way. I think that Obama is more than that. But while this country needs to solve the problems the Kennedys outline in the paragraph above, it needs first to change the tone of the conversation. It needs to build consensus by persuading the malleable middle to lean left.
And while It needs to repudiate as emphatically as it can everything that the last eight years–really thirty years (maybe forty if you want to go back to ’68)–has done to this country, it needs to do so without recrimination. Choosing Obama means choosing this different approach that is not so much about rejecting the past as about embracing a different kind of future. And what we need more than anything as a nation is to develop a renewed sense of future possibility. Once the mood and the mentality change, then the game changes, and you can get things done. Choosing Clinton means choosing to continue the old game and impasse that comes with it.
Hillary and Bill are too much creatures shaped by that miserable thirty or forty-year phase of our history to which we now have to say goodbye. We need to say goodbye to them as much as we have to say to the Nixon/Reagan/Bush mentality that has been so corrosive to what is best in the American soul. It’s time to turn the page and begin the next chapter. So, which side of history are you on?
UPDATE: Fareed Zakaria piles on. Uses the difference between Obama and Clinton on Cuba policy as an example of what Lakoff is talking about:
Obama has advocated easing the Bush-imposed ban on Cuban-Americans visiting the island and sending money to their relatives. He makes a broader case for a new Cuba policy, arguing that capitalism, trade and travel will help break the regime’s stranglehold on the country and help open things up.
Clinton immediately disagreed, firmly supporting the current policy. This places her in the strange position of arguing, in effect, that her husband’s Cuba policy was not hard-line enough. But this is really not the best way to understand Clinton’s position. In all probability, she actually agrees with Obama’s stand. She is just calculating that it would anger Cuban-Americans in Florida and New Jersey.
He goes on to say:
The Clintons’ careers have been shaped by the belief that for a Democrat to succeed, he or she had to work within this conservative ideological framework. Otherwise one would be pilloried for being weak on national security, partial to taxes and big government and out of touch with Middle America’s social values.
That’s why we have to turn the page.
Leave a Reply