Songs of Innocence and Experience

I think we're starting to see a realignment in the Democratic Presidential primary with a Washington insider/Washington outsider split. I admire and respect Chris Dodd, but he and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are clearly on one side of this, wedded to conventional thinking, while Barack Obama and John Edwards are on the other. Richardson is outside of this debate and under the radar, Kucinich is to the ideological left, and Gravel is on his porch and wants you off his property.

Biden was clearly the defender of Washington convention wisdom, the David Broder candidate, at last night's AFL-CIO debate. He took shots at Obama and Edwards at various points for their lack of experience. This exchange was typical:

Throughout the 90-minute debate, each sought to show superior labor credentials, producing one memorable scrape between Edwards and Biden.

"It is fine to come up on this stage and give a nice talk," said Edwards, who is competing hard for union endorsements. "The question is: Who's been with you in the crunch? In the last two years, 200 times, I have walked picket lines. I have helped organize thousands of workers, with 23 national unions."

Minutes later, Biden issued a withering putdown, saying he has walked with and fought on behalf of labor for more than three decades, often in difficult circumstances. "That's the measure of whether we'll be with you when it's tough," he said. "Not when you're running for president in the last two years, marching on 20 or 30 or 50 picket lines."

Right, it's not tough to stand with labor when the Bush Administration is pushing back against unions at an historic rate. Apparently organizing thousands of workers is the wrong thing to do. Biden's actually demeaning it. Somehow I don't think that's a winning answer. Nor is this ideological blind spot that says that only bipartisan solutions will pass. Seems like we've had a relentlessly unipartisan President accomplish a good bit of what he's wanted over that past 6 years. And it reveals a crucial disconnect between the Biden mindset and that of the country outside of DC.

If there is anything that has been apparent since the Democratic takeover of Congress, it’s that many and probably most of the current Republican members of Congress will NEVER work with Democrats for the good of the country. Since the rise of Newt Gingrich, the majority of Republicans in Congress have demonstrated that they don’t care about the good of the country. Grover Norquist is inadvertently one of the most honest of conservatives, and when he referred to bipartisanship as date rape, he wasn’t revealing just his own personal view, he was describing the mindset of much of the Republican Congressional caucus and it’s allies in think tanks, among campaign hacks and activists, and in a sizeable chunk of its electoral base.

It’s a realization many of us had come to long ago. It’s one of the reasons many of us ended up on progressive blogs, the knowledge that George W Bush, his allies in Congress and the people who push them in to power will use unscrupulous means to attain, maintain and exercise power. They know they have to conceal their unscrupulousness from the public. While the Republican party has veered farther and farther to the right, the American people haven’t really budged. In fact, on individual issues, the American public is more liberal today than it was 10 or 20 years ago, and far more liberal than it was when Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, which provided the mandate to enact our major civil rights legislation and the most major extension of the social welfare state since the New Deal and World War II [...]

Senator Biden, please look around, and realize that the solutions to our nation’s woes, the answers to our challenges, aren’t bipartisan. The involvement of people looking for solutions and to meet our challenges could eventually be bipartisan, but current evidence suggest otherwise. No more than four House Republicans have voted for any of the most meaningful pieces of legislation dealing with Iraq. Only four Republicans have joined the Senate Democrats on Iraq. The Republican Study Group in the House engages in delaying tactics almost every day; to see one reason why the House—which has passed significant legislation—isn’t doing more, look at how many bullshit procedural votes the Republican offered last week. In the Senate, the Republicans continue to use the filibuster and cloture votes to bottle up almost everything the Democrats try to accomplish. The Republicans go along with just about everything Bush and Cheney shove down our nation’s throat.

And it's in this category where Hillary Clinton is lining up. Her starpower and a fond look back at her husband has propelled her far out in front of the field so far. But the true colors are starting to show. She's starting to take hits for having a top aide whose PR firm includes a union-busting shop. The Yearly Kos debate was memorable for her only through her stirring defense of those poor, downtrodden Washington lobbyists. And last night's debate offered more missteps.

I'm watching the AFL-CIO debate, and Clinton has made some more major mistakes that open her up to charges of being an elitist and out-of-touch insider. In the argument over Pakistan, Clinton just said that if you are running for President you "shouldn't say everything you think", and got booed.

Earlier, she had fleshed out her opinion on Iraq. While outlining her plan for the country, most of it was focused on withdrawal, but there was an important caveat.

But if it is a possibility that Al Qaeda would stay in Iraq I think we need to stay focused on trying to keep them on the run as we currently are doing in Anbar province.

Anbar is tactically meaningless, as Al Qaeda has left the region and gone elsewhere in Iraq due to tribal pressure. That Clinton is saying that Anbar province is an example of the success of the surge suggests a serious lapse in judgment. She has learned nothing. I have heard that O'Hanlon is an advisor of hers, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case. She is making the liberal hawk argument for remaining in Iraq, or even, supporting the surge.

Clinton's been trying to blur the lines on all of these fronts, trying to get the Democrats on stage to unite behind her, but it's not likely to work; the rest of these guys want the job too. And the true measure of how she's feeling the heat is the fact that she's doling out the pork, offering temporary bailouts for homeowners facing foreclosure. It has a lot of merit, particularly the predatory lending penalties and eliminating early payment penalties, but that doesn't seem to me to be a long-term solution. It's a short-term fix to engender compassion for her and her campaign. Because there is some faltering going on right now.

I would think that the last thing Clinton wants is for Biden and Dodd to join with her on the experience train. Obama and Edwards run the risk of cancelling each other out if they don't differentiate themselves, but clearly this is a change election. Presidents historically don't have a lot of Washington experience. That's just not what the country likes. And it's because Washington experience breeds a kind of contempt for real people and real solutions, rather than bipartisan "serious" solutions. This moment at the AFL-CIO debate cannot be credibly answered by Washington insiderism.

QUESTION: After 34 years with LTV Steel I was forced to retire because of a disability. Two years later, LTV filed bankruptcy. I lost a third of my pension and my family lost their health care.

Every day of my life I sit at the kitchen table across from the woman who devoted 36 years of her life to my family and I can’t afford to pay for her health care. What’s wrong with America and what will you do to change it?

That is where the country is at right now, and I question whether Hillary Clinton will be able to make the sale that she's the one to change it.