The 'False Hope' Example Hillary Can't Use

In Saturday's debate and on the stump, Hillary Clinton is making the argument that hope is fine, but that a candidate not ready to be President will raise "false hopes" by being too inexperienced to fulfill those hopes.

It's a reasonable argument, and there is a very good example which she knows very well, but that she can never use. It's Bill Clinton.

In 1992, it was (perhaps ironically) Bill Clinton who was the "change candidate." He was not only the young candidate--the first baby boomer to seriously seek the office--but he made "change" a major campaign theme. The other day, a reporter on TV said he counted how many times Barak Obama said the word "change" in one speech. A different reporter did the same thing with one of Clinton's debates with Bush the First. In both cases, they said "change" a lot.

After twelve years of Reaganistic Republicanism--with its ardent privatization and deregulation and hollowing out of needed government agencies, its championing of corporate power and policies of impoverishment, its lethal foreign adventures and war in Nicaragua, its corruption and abuses of power, and its demonization of political opponents and fostering of polarization--the country was in deep debt, the economy was wilting, the middle class endangered, the government threatened, and it was time for the kind of progressuve changes Bill Clinton articulated.

After decades near despair, his election was one of the sweetest moments of my life. We were able to breathe again. He was the "Man from Hope."

By the end of eight tumultuous years he had managed to lead us back from the brink, to reverse much of the destruction wreaked by 12 years of Republican rule, and put the country back on track and with a solid foundation to move ahead in the 21st century. On the other hand... We all know what threw his second term off track. But his first term also started disastrously.

Once in the White House, he attempted to move boldly, but he and his people failed to anticipate the powerful opposition to his attempt to reverse the ban of gays in the military by presidential order. His pencil thin Democratic majority in Congress gave him some early victories, but as other controversies and perceived disorganization allowed the Republican noise machine to blow mud on the waters, there were limitations and defeats.

The biggest defeat was on universal health care. This became an issue in the 1992 campaign mostly because of a single TV ad in Pennsylvania a year or so before, when Democrat Harris Wofford ran for the Senate seat that opened as a result of the tragic death of moderate Republican Senator John Heinz in a plane crash. In the ad, Wofford was seen outside an operating room or some such medical scene, asking why members of Congress get complete health care, and other Americans don't. Given little chance of winning at the beginning of his campaign, he was elected by 10 points, and suddenly universal health care became a winning issue.

The idea of universal health care was arguably Bill Clinton's most popular issue when he ran. It wasn't all "the economy." When he took office, it remained popular. He was so confident that Congress had to pass his plan that he branished a pen at a State of the Union address, and said he would use it to veto any plan that didn't include universal coverage.

But both Bill and Hillary Clinton weren't experienced enough in Washington politics to see the extent and the power of the opposition, particularly from powerful corporations and lobbyists. They weren't experienced enough to build coalitions in framing the plan, although the case can also be made that pretty much everyone--media included--believed that their plan would pass overwhelmingly, and that whatever mistakes they made were unforeseeable.

Partly because Clinton had raised hopes for change that he couldn't make, his popularity plummeted, and for this and other reasons--some probably more powerful than this one--the Democrats suffered their devastating off-year election defeat in 1994, when Newt Gingrich and his Contract on America swept into power, and swept many Democrats out (including Harris Wofford, who was defeated by newcomer Rick Santorum.) Democrats lost control of Congress, and have yet to fully regain it.

This is not an argument against or in favor of Hillary Clinton's candidacy, nor a knock against Barack Obama. If it wasn't possible to learn from other people's experience, we may as well forget about education. It's just, if you will, one of those curious ironies of political campaigns.

This is really the subtext of what Hillary Clinton means by experience--she lived through this nightmare, and eventually she and Bill Clinton survived and triumphed, though having done much less than they had hoped, or led those who elected them to hope.

But what she can't come out and say is, when an inexperienced change agent raises hopes and can't fulfill them, the immediate result can be disaster, and the attempt to survive the catastrophe will cause him to pull back on much of that change, and concentrate on what most needs to be accomplished that can be accomplished, and that can rehabilitate his political power. And the reason she knows this is it happened to her husband, and to her.