A style I don't care for

[jducoeur]

Okay, let's enumerate:

• From the very beginning, it was clear what you wanted. Oh, you played coy about it, but pretty much everyone knew for years that you were spoiling for this, and just waiting for your opportunity. You've never been good at subtlety.
  
• You went in with full confidence of winning. After all, you were rich and powerful, and everyone *knew* that you were rich and powerful. So you went for a "shock and awe" approach, intended to win all the chips with a single hand. Fair enough as a first-choice strategy.
  
• You expected the populace to simply lay down, acclaim you the victor, and follow you happily. You were badly wrong-footed when they didn't do so. Worse, it quickly became clear that you didn't have a Plan B ready for the possibility that they wouldn't.
  
• You appointed advisors mainly on the basis of personal loyalty, sometimes to the point of sycophancy. This wound you up cocooned in a circle that didn't give you any real sense of how things were going, and encouraged more foolish misjudgements. It took much too long for you to fire them and start appointing people on the basis of competence instead.
  
• You really never understood the insurgency and how it worked. You've consistently tried to keep fighting an old-fashioned war, and that has cost you dearly, because the other side was fighting with very different and sometimes more effective techniques -- more decentralized, harder to simply topple with overwhelming force.
  
• You blew through money at a rate that astounded everyone. Starting with considerable financial assets, you wound up having to borrow heavily to keep going. This doesn't seem to have entered into your calculations as possibly a reason to step back and reflect.
  
• Your sometimes ruthless and frequently ham-handed approach to dealing with the insurgency cost you considerable respect with the wider community. It took you far too long to realize that throwing constant hammer-blows wasn't a winning approach. You promoted an us-versus-them attitude that simply undermined the whole enterprise.
  
• And when you *did* finally start to make some progress, you simply couldn't hear the growing chorus of voices saying, "Too little, too late". Your stubborn refusal to leave the battlefield looks increasingly desperate and pathetic, rather than strong.

Am I addressing Bush in Iraq, or Clinton on the campaign trail? I don't know, and *that* is the main reason I've become increasingly unhappy with the idea of her as President.

Yes, it's a somewhat unfair, extreme and selective analogy. But it's an informative one. The campaign trail is war writ small, and it tells us a lot about a candidate's style of governance. Clinton has made a remarkable number of the same *kinds* of mistakes that Bush is famous for, and that worries me enormously. And so I've gone from favoring her for President a year ago, to quite actively hoping that her current desperate attempt to strong-arm Obama into naming her as his running mate doesn't succeed. She's proven herself a fine legislator, and I suspect she's a decent administrator. But she hasn't shown the kind of judgement I want in a governor.

(This post brought to you by Terry McAuliffe's downright surreal "Of *course* we're going to win" appearance on The Daily Show last night, and Clinton's ridiculously unsubtle political maneuverings going on right now...)

Comments

[its-just-me.livejournal.com]

Really well written, although I'm not really certain about the blowing through money thing.

[laurion]

It holds up to numbers. The Clinton campaign is now very deep in debt, and Obama is raising record contributions. It's a different picture than it was 6 months ago.

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty much in the same boat as you on this. I liked her at the beginning, not so much anymore, for exactly the reasons you enumerate.

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

What struck me was that it seems that Hillary Clinton never read the party rules. The Democratic party has rules on how delegates work and Obama showed that he was much better able to understand them

[jducoeur]

Actually, that's yet another fine one for the list. I don't think it's that she didn't understand the rules; rather, I think she's just contemptuous of rules that get in her way -- again, much like Bush. If the current rules don't let you do what you want, do everything possible to rewrite them to match what you need right now, or simply try to trample over them. The high-handed *whining* about the rules compromise really irritated the heck out of me.

Indeed, that's one of the most disturbing of the analogies. Of all Bush's faults, the worst is the way he has expanded the Imperial Presidency, and that's quite bound up with his contempt for the rule and process of law. As I've said in the past, what I *most* want from the next President is someone who will roll that back a ways. I think that's fairly likely of Obama (who seems to be a fine tactician, skilled at working within the rules and making the best of them), and maybe of McCain (who strikes me as having some respect for Order as a principle, but has been annoyingly willing to compromise his principles when convenient), but my confidence that Clinton would do so has been shaken...

[laurion]

* Acts as though the rules don't apply, or can be set aside

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that has struck me, too. I was actually at the Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting on Saturday, and in all the ranting from supporters about electability, it occurred to me that arguably the past two elections have been decided in rules fights of one sort or another (I count the Kerry campaign's decision not to contest the voting irregularities in Ohio in that category.) To me, that's a strong argument that the candidate who knows how to use the rules is more "electable" (though I hope it doesn't come to that this time around.)

[cellio]

Yeah, the "if the rules don't suit my needs, whine until they overturn the rules" tactic really grated on me.

Thank you for posting this list. Well-done.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

I found a dark amusement in reading your post. Thanks!

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

I think the point about choosing and retaining advisors for loyalty over competence is probably the one that's the least unfair, and to me, the most unexpected.