Across the
pond, Labour's quasi-sisters in the Democratic Party are
edging closer to what was perhaps always the most likely outcome of their
primary - Hillary Clinton winning the nomination, on her way to becoming
America’s first female president. However, the unexpected strength of Bernie
Sanders’ insurgency has exposed weaknesses in the Clinton armour and for better
or worse, it has also raised internal questions for the Democrats for November
and beyond. Meanwhile, Labour’s equivalent contest last year - if we’re honest,
many discussions of the US primaries among Labourites are partly proxy
arguments about our own present crisis - involved a decisively opposite result,
but the scale of our continuing dysfunction has prevented us from capitalising
even on the full-blown civil war the Tories have fallen into over Europe, the budget
and the Panama Papers revelations.
As Ed Walis of
the Fabian Society observed
in January, “The core problem here is that, unlike their rivals [on the
centre-right], parties of the left are required to excite as well as reassure”.
The left’s inability to square this circle has left us riven post-crash, with
the centre-right triumphing across Europe merely by offering a steadying hand
on the tiller. Milibandism represented a concerted crack at finding a formula,
but Ed's effort exposed just how hard it is to achieve in practice without that
intangible x-factor of credibility to buttress it, and we wound up losing “everywhere
to everybody” in Jon Cruddas’ brutal assessment. We failed to excite on the
left, hence the SNP’s hegemony, a token tripling of the urban Green vote last
May and Labour’s ongoing Corbynmania. And neither could we reassure voters in
the middle – as Rafael
Behr just noted, perceived competence is less optional to the general
public than compassion, and continued Tory dominance is the result there. For a
time New Labour’s genius was fusing
the two, leaving a nasty Tory party wallowing in irrelevance, but Corbyn’s
crushing internal win has marginalised “eat
your greens” Labour rightism and even to a degree the
soft-left, laying bare the need for deep introspection.
The drawn-out
Democratic primary is down to a somewhat similar dichotomy. As Mario Cuomo once
said, “you campaign in poetry. You govern in prose” – Bernie has been the
candidate for the former and Hillary the latter, with neither fully able to
break out of type.
Between the
two, I do prefer Hillary. Bernie has inspired millions of Americans and given
voice to burning disaffection with the status quo. He has pushed inequality and
social democratic politics up the agenda in America and pulled Hillary left, and
seen to it that she will be nominated rather than crowned. But in a
quarter-century in congress he has
shown little aptitude for delivering the kind of transformative changes he
talks about and has appeared unable to match Hillary’s intellectual curiosity
and willingness to offer detailed solutions, even on his cause célèbre of Wall Street reform.
While I prefer some of his foreign policy instincts, notably the vote against
Iraq he frequently touts, Hillary has since
apologised for her vote for the war and as a globe-trotting former First
Lady and Secretary of State, she has a particular command of foreign affairs as
a core responsibility of the presidency and will ensure that the US remains a strong internationalist presence in the world.
There’s also
an electoral case for Hillary. Bernie’s anti-establishment instincts do draw some American Independents to him, but they also entail a deep
aversion on his part to the Democratic Party he nominally seeks to lead and a
reluctance to support many of its down-ticket
candidates. Hillary meanwhile is sharing the proceeds of her fundraising
with state
Democratic parties, in a nod to a key lesson of the Obama years - defeating
the Republicans at the congressional and state level too is a requirement for transformative
progressive change. In a recent state
Supreme Court election in Wisconsin, the failure by a critical share of
Sanders voters to vote for the liberal candidate may have aided the election of
an extreme far-right judge (though in this case Bernie himself did join Hillary
in endorsing the liberal candidate, it should be said).
Bernie’s call
for “political revolution”, a theory around rousing non-voters similar to one
frequently invoked for Jeremy Corbyn here, also struggles. Primary
turnout is overall lower than it was in the historic 2008 contest and
Hillary has counterintuitively won more of the higher-turnout
primaries, while Bernie
does better in the more exclusionary caucuses. Further, while there is some
real evidence of an untapped bloc of
progressive non-voters in the US, reaching these people will be resource-intensive
and crucially, they tend to be black or Hispanic. At least in the current
active primary electorate, Hillary owes her entire lead to the fact that she has
been able to court the minority voters that have been indispensable in the Obama
coalition, while Bernie’s campaign has relied on disproportionately
white states and has recently resorted to openly dismissing the
significance of the southern
African-American vote. Moreover, the real challenge is to build the
Democratic Party to bring these voters out in
midterm years, rather than them just turning up for a single presidential
candidate as they have for Obama (again, hence Hillary’s party-building).
Finally, while
early
general election polls show Bernie to be a stronger choice against all GOP
candidates, Hillary’s admittedly high negatives after 24 years of unprecedented
public vetting and her status as a uniquely
qualified candidate for the presidency are both built in to her solid floor
of support. By comparison, the Republicans have largely refrained from attacks
on Bernie thus far and signalled that they would prefer
to face him in November. There is also an asymmetry in that Bernie’s voters
are currently less
likely than Hillary’s to pledge to support the other if they are the
Democratic nominee, but as with Hillary’s
2008 supporters and Obama after the bitter primaries then, a more united
front should emerge once the wounds heal and attention shifts to the full
consequences of a Republican presidency.
However, while this sort of case for Hillary seems to be proving sufficient for a hard-fought win, it relies fairly heavily on pragmatism and devotion to process, rather than a gut appeal
to the instinct and emotion that drives so much of politics, and especially the
optimism of progressive politics. Several commentators have noted how much of
a liability
Hillary’s nuanced thinking about government can be on the stump. Much more
so though, her deep insider
connections are even more troubling in a post-crash world than they were in
the primaries at the start of 2008. A rhetorical crutch for her this year has
been highlighting that Obama too took Wall Street donations, but this overlooks
a difference that many Democratic voters probably sense and fear – when Obama
was running against Hillary, he drew a contrast in
saying “the argument is not that I'm pristine, because I'm swimming in the
same muddy water. The argument is that I know it's muddy and I want to clean it
up". It’s true that Bernie hasn’t been able to pin Hillary on any specific
impropriety over her Wall Street ties, but there’s a value in the feeling
that Obama wouldn’t be caught dead giving a paid speech to Goldman Sachs at
all.
In fighting
for his signature healthcare reforms, that same trust also allowed Obama to pull
off a
line like “it's time to let the drug and insurance industries know that
while they'll get a seat at the table, they don't get to buy every chair" (Bernie would object to the first premise of pragmatic engagement to achieve reform,
while from Hillary the defiant pledge to control interest-group influence might seem insincere to those to her left). And his fluency allowed him to more easily
make the case for Obamacare, warts and all, to a sceptical left when the time came to herd all Democrats behind a particular model.
Hillary's knowledge of
healthcare policy is unimpeachable and her case for building
on Obamacare instead of going back to the drawing board is absolutely the
right one. But while she has meandered
between different explanations of why she is sceptical of Sanders’ pitch
for a single-payer system, Obama has always had an airtight and honest response
that works coming from him. He long sought to mollify single-payer advocates by
stating that he would support their approach if he were “designing
a system from scratch”, and indeed used
to support it as a little-known Illinois legislator. But as a president
grappling directly with the staggering institutional barriers to reform, he opted for the
mixed approach of Obamacare as a means to dramatically improve coverage while assuring the already-insured
majority and certain medical
interests that they would not be heavily disrupted by a shakeup (the main
lesson senior Democrats took away from the defeated
1994 Clinton reforms). For all the Affordable Care Act’s gaping imperfections,
walking the tightrope between radicalism and practicality allowed Obama to
unlock the Democratic holy grail and start to save lives.
Hillary is now
effectively running to be a third term of Obama and continue his legacy, in
contrast to Bernie’s disconcerting belief that a lack of “presidential
leadership” is what has prevented greater headway in the past eight years. But
her difficulties show that she is not a full substitute for the real thing, when
Obama prevented Democrats from having to so starkly choose between uplifting
idealism and managerial pragmatism. And at home, Labour’s present crisis suggests
our warring factions must all hope we have someone in our midst of his talent,
to bind together the national coalition we need to win again. I’ll miss Barack
Obama.
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