Hillary Clinton is saying things she doesn’t believe. Good for her.
Her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Trade deal is clearly a ploy to match the threat from the more liberal Bernie Sanders, who has opposed it from the start. Prior to discovering her poll-tested opposition, she had made something like 45 statements on the record in favor of this particular agreement, and she comes from the moderate wing of the party, more or less founded by her husband, that believes in this kind of thing in principle.
But here’s the question: Is there a successful politician alive who hasn’t trimmed or reversed a position in order to win an election? And just how bad a thing is this?
It’s not like this is a new phenomenon. For example, both Clinton and Barack Obama said they opposed gay marriage when they ran against each other in 2008. I had no doubt at the time that both of them actually supported it, but they knew that at that point in American history they couldn’t say so and have a chance of being elected. So they took the position that was politically expedient in order to have a chance at actually governing. They waited for the brave men and women who came out as gay and who changed the conversation to create the political safety net that allowed them to change their public positions. It’s not pretty, but that’s just how it works.
And if you still want to be aghast and disgusted by Obama’s and Hillary’s opportunism, well, let me offer up Lincoln and FDR.
For almost his entire political career Abraham Lincoln was not in favor of abolishing slavery. During his 1860 campaign and after being elected he said clearly that his goal was to preserve the union any way he could, even if that meant keeping slavery going. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation only when a military victory cleared the way politically for it, and even then it applied only to states that were “currently in rebellion” against the national government at the moment a few months hence when it would go into effect. In other words, if they had returned to the fold in time they could have kept the peculiar institution intact. There’s no doubt that Lincoln hated slavery, but he went only so far as the practical political environment would allow.
Franklin Roosevelt ran for a third term in 1940 by promising to keep the nation out of World War II, all the while maneuvering to help Britain against the Nazis. He didn’t plunge the nation into war until the Japanese gave him an excellent political opening at Pearl Harbor. The man most credited with defeating Hitler did so only after essentially lying about his intent so that he could win an election.
So, the Great Emancipator and the man who did more than anyone to free the world from the greatest monster of the 20th century were both conniving, cunning politicians. And thank God for it.
Now, you can take this sort of thing too far, as Gov. Scott Walker recently demonstrated. In his 70-day presidential bid Walker changed so many of his positions so fast that he lost all credibility. It’s one thing to evolve a position over several years or months; it’s another thing to do it between the morning and evening news shows. Politicians say things they don’t mean all the time to win an election; Walker was guilty of being way too flippant and way too transparent about how he did it. People at least want to be given the whisper of a hope that you have some core beliefs.
But we’re setting ourselves up for repeated disappointment if we expect our politicians to be absolutely consistent and open about what they really believe. And in fact, running only on what you personally believe can be viewed as a form of narcissism. After all, a candidate’s job is to try to represent us; not themselves. To a large extent they need to reflect whatever the mood and positions of the country are at the moment and put their personally held beliefs on hold.
In fact, it was that narcissist Ralph Nader who brought us George W. Bush and the resulting two decades of virtual inaction on climate change, the deepest recession since the Great Depression, and the war in Iraq. These are the wages of political purity.
The most we should expect from a politician is that she has core values and instincts and will work to take her constituents in a certain basic direction. Practical — that is, electable — politicians will tack back and forth across the political oceans to get into and then to stay in office. The thing for voters to try to understand is what port they have in mind.
Educated liberals can be especially naïve about politics. So, my fellow liberals, please join me here in the real political world. I don’t want an idealist who says exactly what I think. I want a tough-as-nails pragmatic politician who knows just how far he or she can go in the real political world and who will, because of that skill set, be successful in moving the country in a basic direction that makes us better. We should have no use for purity.
