Also looking prescient today, along with yours truly, is my Atlantic colleague Josh Green, who more than a year ago concluded a profile of Hillary Clinton's Senate career thusly:
... it is fair to wonder if Clinton learned the lesson of the health-care disaster too well, whether she has so embraced caution and compromise that she can no longer judge what merits taking political risks. It is hard to square the brashly confident leader of health-care reform—willing to act on her deepest beliefs, intent on changing the political climate and not merely exploiting it—with the senator who recently went along with the vote to make flag-burning a crime. Today Clinton offers no big ideas, no crusading causes—by her own tacit admission, no evidence of bravery in the service of a larger ideal. Instead, her Senate record is an assemblage of many, many small gains. Her real accomplishment in the Senate has been to rehabilitate the image and political career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Impressive though that has been in its particulars, it makes for a rather thin claim on the presidency. Senator Clinton has plenty to talk about, but she doesn’t have much to say.
At the time, this struck me as a little unfair: After two terms of George W. Bush and his various "crusading causes," Hillary's Senate record - her incrementalism, her sense of compromise, her politics of cautious hard work - felt like an advertisement for a Clinton presidency, rather than a "thin claim" on it. But so far in '08, it seems clear that an awful lot of voters (in both parties) are more inclined to Josh's take on things. They want to feeled called; they want to be inspired; they want to be asked to make history. The Clinton campaign offered them that chance, in a sense: Electing the first female President would be nearly as much of a history-making event as electing the first black President. But Clinton didn't offer voters the atmospherics of a history-making campaign, or the rhetoric, or the attitude. And the record that she crafted and the persona she adopted over six years in the Senate - as the safe choice, the responsible choice, the moderate and pragmatic and experienced choice - may turn out to be no match for this:
In addition to wanting to feel inspired and called, I and others want to "blow up" the current federal leadership in the way that one blows up a bad sports team. And you cannot do this by reelecting the White House of the Nineties. The dynasties are over.
O is for onward.
Posted by tinisoli | January 4, 2008 12:04 PM