Hillary: still dividing

What does it mean to be a uniter in politics? 

Politics, after all, is about choices.  Without clear differences between candidates, between parties, between policies, elections have no meaning.  Hand-wringers who long for complete national unity should try North Korea.  Division is a hallmark of democracy. 

And yet there’s something pernicious when politicians actively seek to pit citizens against one another.  The classic example in modern U.S. history is conservative politicians who have spent decades scapegoating minorities, immigrants, and “secular elites” for the problems of “regular” (read: white, middle-class) Americans — all while implementing policies that benefit the privileged few over everybody else. 

It’s one thing for politicians to explain why their proposals are superior to those of their opponents.  It’s another thing for politicians to intentionally cultivate resentments among groups of people. In other words, there’s creative division — the kind by which we express our voices as free people — and there’s destructive division, which clouds our judgment and keeps us from understanding how to improve our lives in the political arena. 

Consider, for instance, this gem from a recent George Packer article in the New Yorker: 

[Pat] Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum — “A little raw for today,” he warned — that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading “Dividing the Democrats.” Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in “the Old Roosevelt Coalition,” it recommended that the White House “exacerbate the ideological division” between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon’s policies; highlight “the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party”; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare.  Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. “Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country,” Buchanan wrote. “We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention.” Such gambits, he added, could “cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.” 

Republicans call this strategy “positive polarization”; I call it destructive division.  Take your alliterative pick. But my sense is that the ideal form of unity in politics occurs when disagreements are policy-based, respectful, with empathy for those who are not like us, and with earnest honesty from our leaders.  And instead of appealing to the worst in people, politicians appeal to our hopes, to what we actually want to achieve from our politics.  For those are the conditions — some of them, anyway — that empower the public to arrive at constructive political decisions.

The reason I bring all this up is I’m seeing a destructively divisive impulse in Hillary Clinton’s Black Knight-esque presidential campaign.  Last night, after Barack Obama clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary seemed utterly uninterested in graceful conciliation.  She’s no Pat Buchanan, but in the context of an intraparty fight that her opponent has already won — and in which the policy differences are minimal — she’s doing what she thinks she can get away with.   

First, she had Terry McAuliffe introduce her as “the next president of the United States,” thereby continuing to spit in the face of Obama’s victory.  Then she repeated the lie that she won the popular vote — a claim that depends on awarding Obama zero votes in Michigan since his name wasn’t on the ballot (so much for rewarding those who “work hard and play by the rules”) and discounts several caucus states that don’t track the popular vote (so much for making sure “every vote counts”).  Then Hillary rubbed her supposed electability advantage in Obama’s face by recounting all the swing states she had won — ignoring, of course, the swing states like Iowa and Colorado where Obama came out ahead.  And she maintained that making “every vote count” was central to her campaign, perpetuating the preposterous idea that delegates in Florida and Michigan were illegitimately stolen from her — never mind that she herself acknowledged long ago that these votes wouldn’t count. 

Perhaps most annoyingly, she asserted: “I want the nearly 18 million Americans who voted for me to be respected, to be heard, and no longer be invisible.”  How, exactly, were her supporters “invisible” compared to Barack Obama’s?  And how could they now be made more visible?  The only plausible answer seems to be to hand Hillary the vice presidential slot — an honor that her surrogates have been insisting non-stop that she wants. 

In other words, Hillary is trying to blackmail Obama for the vice presidency.  She’s not arguing about issues.  She’s even not being honest about her political strength.  She’s trying to stir up resentment among her supporters.  She wants them to feel cheated over Florida and Michigan, over supposed media bias, over sexism as the cause of her defeat (as if racism hasn’t been equally if not more grotesque in this election, given exit polling suggesting a disconcertingly large portion of her voters were racially driven). 

Her implication all the while is that if Obama doesn’t offer her the vice presidential nomination, she’ll keep stoking bitterness in her supporters.  The fact that her policy prescriptions and Obama’s are pretty darn close is irrelevant.  What matters is power, and if Hillary has to threaten party division in order to achieve that power, so be it. 

Barack Obama has made unity and reconciliation — the good kind — central to his campaign.  It’s sad to see a great public servant like Hillary Clinton stoop to the level of undermining this noble effort.

Still, if Obama needs to pick her for veep in order to maintain party unity and win in November, fine.  She’s certainly a lot better than John McCain.  But Obama should also bear in mind that he won’t win unless voters believe in his message of unity and change.  Whether Hillary can effectively buttress this message is an open question, to put it mildly.