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March 8-9, 2008

International Women's Day

You Can't Lick the Boot that Kicks You

The Only Way to Fight the Clintons

By JOANN WYPIJEWSKI

Three weeks before the Ohio primary Blanche McKinney, an assistant manager at
Stark Metro Housing and a member of CWA Local 4302 in Canton, told me, "Do we
have the time to get someone in there who's inexperienced? No. It's got to be
someone who on day one can immediately begin solving problems, because we don't
have the time." Her union brothers in the group I was talking to were still undecided
at that point, but McKinney was for Hillary. The only thing she wasn't sure she liked
about the candidate was her health care plan: "a lot of Canadians don't like their
program." She seemed relieved when I assured her Hillary was not promoting a
Canadian-style single-payer system.
McKinney is solidly in Hillary's most solid base: 59, white, a woman, making less than
=$50,000, rural. Although she works in Canton's public housing, she and her husband
are also small farmers. He doesn't buy anything unless the label says "Made in
America". She says she "never seriously thought this was a problem" but asks her
union brothers anyway about Barack Obama's name and the "Muslim connection
back then in Indonesia": "You say that doesn't bother you even a little?" The four
men, three white and one black, said they didn't think so. Dustin Robinett, white, 33,
an AT&T repairman, explained what he saw as Obama's slim "connection to the
Muslim nation" (his father's childhood religion, his step-father's religion) before going
into an extended consideration of multiculturalism, the melting pot, global
experience, religion and politics, the habits of men: "we're all afraid of things that are
different."
"In God we trust", said Bob Ramsey wryly, a long-hair AT&T inspector in a camo
baseball cap, 41, white.
These were the first people I talked to during a week in Ohio before the primary, so it
wasn't until later that I noticed there was something else about McKinney that
seemed common among Clinton's most passionate supporters. Most really believed
Hillary herself would begin to solve problems immediately upon taking residence at
Pennsylvania Avenue. For all the talk after her victory of Hillary as "a fighter" and
Ohioans as "fighters" and all of that being a perfect match -- the boxing gloves she
held up at events, the endorsement from world middleweight champion and
Youngstown native Kelly ("The Ghost") Pavlik -- what seemed truer was that Hillary's
solid rank and file aren't fighters at all, or haven't been for a long time. The late
Youtube entry into the campaign, a sequence of visuals from Clinton's TV
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commercials and some still photos backed by John Stewart's "Survivors," made the
point precisely. Clinton Country doesn't fight; it survives, and hopes for deliverance.
Bill and Hillary themselves are matchless fighters, and the singular genius of their
first eight-year reign was to enlist their supporters as partisan spectators to their
fights: against Gennifer Flowers, against Pentagon brass who forced them into "Don't
ask, don't tell", against "Harry and Sally", against Newt Gingrich, against the
undeserving poor, against gay-baiters who forced them into the Defense of Marriage
Act, against Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, against Ken Starr and "the vast right-
wing conspiracy." Meanwhile, the spectators themselves became punching bags, but
so thoroughly had they been corralled into the Clintons' bleachers that it was as if
they could do nothing but take it, perhaps raising a squeak of protest briefly, before
turning back to the main event, cheering on their friends, oppressors, friends, the
Clintons.
After Hillary won Ohio, having beaten up Obama on NAFTA, a real estate deal and the
danger an Obama presidency would pose to sleeping children, the two obvious
questions were how did she manage to turn NAFTA into a negative for him, and why
didn't he fight back quicker, harder, more effectively? The same might be asked of
Ohio itself, and everything Ohio represents, across the long decline of wages and jobs
and manufacturing to the present state of social insecurity for which "NAFTA" has
become shorthand. For the plain fact is that until the anarchists rose up in Seattle,
along with better behaved opponents of neoliberal globalization, shutting down the
WTO meeting in the twilight of the Clinton years, no one fought at all except the
right.
It is almost hard to believe now that the reason health insurance was on the Clintons'
first agenda at all, back in 1992, was because there was a mini movement for single-
payer in the country. Labor unions, citizens groups, doctors' and nurses' groups,
some business leaders, had all been agitating, making it an election issue in other
races, writing letters, organizing meetings, protests, media attention. Bill Clinton
rode that wave and immediately after being elected, while in the transition, he asked
his allies to shut up; Wall Street was already breathing down his neck, the right was
bringing heat, trust him and he would, as promised, "put people first" when it came
to health care. A protest caravan that had been planned was canceled. One of the
biggest players in the coalition, the unions, so flattered to have a president who
actually spoke to them, were eager to comply. Bill gave the job of health care reform
to Hillary, who studiously interviewed all the players, at one point asking Dr. David
Himmelstein, a major exponent of a Canadian-style system "where's the power?"
behind such a reform. "Seventy-five percent of the American people," he answered,
to which she replied, "Tell me something interesting."
The people never have been interesting to the Clintons, not in organized, confident
form. They have been interesting as election props and poll numbers, and interesting
as victims, atomized, whose pain could be felt, causes championed, and misery
exploited. They are interesting to Bill on rope lines, as exemplars of popular adulation
and individuals to be charmed or lectured. Hillary used to hate the rope lines, hate
being touched, and in the 1992 campaign she used to make sure that big men were
around her to keep the plebs at bay. That changed as her ambition grew and she
discovered Purell instant hand santizer. Having purelled universal health care as a
live issue for a generation, she's back at it, just where she wants to be, as an answer
to a murmured prayer, among a populace mobilized for nothing but elections.
Bill Clinton bribed and buttered up every member of Congress he could to pass
NAFTA in 1993. The unions made speeches and phone calls and rallied here and
there, but it wasn't much of a fight. And it wasn't the only issue that labor failed to
make into an energetic public case. Even as unions were being crushed by employer
intimidation during representation campaigns, they didn't fight en masse for labor
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law reform while Clinton had a Democratic Congress, and they didn't fight, after the
long night of Reaganism, for a seachange in government priorities, for an industrial
policy, for reinvestment to end the bleeding of their jobs and their communities and
the class. Organized labor vowed to throw out the bums who had passed NAFTA, but
ended up backing most of them for re-election in 1994, and did nothing to organize
globally with other losers in the aggressively pro-capital regimen of neoliberal
capitalism. The Democrats lost Congress, which only made unions (if not their
members) more loyal. Clinton lectured delegates to the AFL-CIO convention in 1995
about how he was right on NAFTA and right in his vision of retraining and lifetime
learning and the high-tech tomorrow, and the union men and women stood, clapping
and hollering their approval. They told their members he was all that stood between
them and destruction in the form of Republicans, and mobilized voters for his re-
election in 1996 and that of his v.p., Al Gore, in 2000. Now workers come to Hillary's
rallies and her "town halls" telling reporters of the multiple agonies of their towns
and their counties and repeating the rumor judiciously planted by campaign
supporters in the press and on the streets: "You know, privately she was against
NAFTA from the beginning." Now she is the solution, the savior for everything that
ails them.
Anyone who wants chapter and verse on how cynical the Clinton team was on the
price of deindustrialization should read Louis Uchitelle's book of a couple of years
ago, The Disposable American. And for a refresher course in the realities of the
"peace and prosperity" that the Clintons promise to bring back -- and anyone who
has trailed the campaigns in a primary state cannot miss that "the Clintons" are
indeed running as a team promising to do just that -- there is Robert Pollin's
devastating account of global austerity at the end of the '90s, Contours of
Descent. But the larger point is how they got away with it. The prison population and
prison labor (engaged in everything from taking reservations to sewing jeans to
building furniture and transmissions for pennies an hour) mushroomed under
Clinton's three-strikes-you're-out and kindred crime policies, and organized labor
didn't fight. Prisons expanded, and organized labor didn't fight. (To the extent that
more cops and more prison guards and more construction crews were real or
potential union members, this development was sometimes even welcomed.)
Privatization moved apace here as in so many other sectors, and organized labor
didn't fight. The prisons filled with young black and Latino men, and black leadership
didn't fight, Latino leadership didn't fight, the civil rights movements didn't fight --
not in any robust, sustained and visible fashion, just like the unions with job loss,
NAFTA and the decline in real wages. Now one in less than 100 adult Americans is
locked up. That was a blip in the news during the campaigns in Ohio and Texas.
Hillary Clinton called for even more cops on the streets, more community policing
and only lastly a review of sentencing.
I don't know if Obama, then struggling to defend himself as someone who would not
allow America's sleeping children to be slaughtered by foreigners, said anything at
all. But there was no popular outcry he might have ridden or been pressured by, no
mass organized black or Latino outcry, just as there had been none during the Clinton
reign. Critics say Obama is isolated because he's maintained a careful distance from
black leadership, and that is true, except that that leadership has allowed its children
to be criminalized and locked up, and all the while cheered for Bill, rustled votes for
Bill, just plain liked Bill, and in many cases signed on early to his wife's campaign
without making mass incarceration an issue. Prisons have been the only real growth
industry in Ohio's Mahoning County, home of Youngstown and its supposed
population of fighters, and the county went 64 percent for Hillary on March 4.
Organized feminists didn't fight when Clinton continued Reagan's war on "welfare
queens" in more polite language. They didn't fight as women were made peon labor,
displacing unionized public workers, or as they were made a captive labor force for
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multinationals like Tyson's chicken. Or as they were threatened with eviction from
public housing. Or as they were forced into more peon labor in exchange for that
public housing. NARAL fought against the forced imposition of chemical contraception
on poor women, but again on an issue that potently united the interests of organized
labor, women, blacks, Latinos, the poor, there was no mass sustained, visible fight.
ACORN launched a campaign to organize welfare workers, and pushed for them to
get gloves while picking up garbage for a few dollars a day in public parks. There
were protests here and there, just as there were strikes here and there, labor rallies
here and there, marches of blacks and others angered by the criminal control system
here and there during the 1990s. But mostly there was abject surrender.
Predatory lending increased, and there was no fight. Household indebtedness
increased, and there was no fight. Deregulation marched on, leading the way for the
current foreclosure crisis among other things, and there was no fight. Hillary Clinton's
closest foreign policy adviser now, Madeleine Albright, said the death of half a million
children because of sanctions on Iraq was "worth it", and there was no fight. The drug
war escalated on American city streets and in Colombia with the bribing and arming
of government-linked paramilitaries, and there was no fight. Bill Clinton wrote anti-
gay discrimination into law in the Defense of Marriage Act and there was no fight.
While he had a Democratic Congress and squandered an opportunity for banning
discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in civilian life, he won cheers from
gays and their bloc vote at the ballot box for fighting for their equal opportunity to be
paid killers and cannon fodder.
Talk about the "kitchen sink"! If Barack Obama wanted to throw it at the eight years
of First Lady experience that Hillary Clinton has made central to her resume for "the
job" she says she wants us to "hire" her for, there is plenty there. People on the left
who say he won't, he can't because he's just like her, a creature of capital and
empire, may be right in the grand scheme, but they shouldn't be smug, because
there aren't exactly models of successful radical or even liberal fights against the
Clintons. There are barely models of noble but failed fights. And Hillary's own
revamped self-presentation as the populist fighter, sworn foe of big corporations,
friend of the little people, ultimate underdog, makes clear that Obama's ties to Wall
Street should be no more an impediment than hers are in the game of political
fisticuffs.
Already it looks like Obama's advisers are getting it completely wrong, though,
challenging her for her First Lady papers and her tax returns and, implicitly, the
source of her and Bill's immense wealth. Obama can no more beat the Clintons at
this kind of game than the right could. Every small, personal complaint looks petty or
desperate or sexist, and only allows Hillary to play the part she likes best, after mud
slinger and policy wonk, which is survivor. She played that part in New Hampshire
and in Ohio, and she'll play it again any time she wants to put on the show that "for
anyone who's ever been counted out", for anyone who's ever had to struggle against
the odds, for anyone who's ever been treated unfairly, she's their gal. It's as phony a
show as can be imagined, but it's the one the Clintons perfected against the right,
and their hard core supporters are on autopilot now to respond to it. Likewise, Obama
can't beat the Clintons in pure bloviating wonkery. Some of his advisors are saying he
should quit the big inspiring rallies and do small tedious meetings of the type that
Hillary's supporters walk out of, even as they'll later pull the lever for her at the polls.
It's not her "plans" that draw voters; like Blanche McKinney, most people don't even
know what those plans involve even after reading them. It's her aura of dogged
competence, based on the entirely fraudulent story of "putting people first" and thus
widening the circle of peace and prosperity during the Clinton years. It's also her skin
color, and if anyone doesn't think Bill Clinton knew what he was doing in South
Carolina, locking up the white racist vote for his wife, they should talk to some of her
supporters in Ohio.
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Obama can't do anything about that last "asset" of Hillary Clinton, and maybe it is
her ultimate chip, but it would make for a more interesting campaign going forward if
he would challenge that First Lady experience by implicitly challenging the myths on
which it stands, projecting an idea of the future unmoored from the Reagan-Clinton
continuum, something Hillary is locked into. What drew so many people originally to
Obama's campaign was its call to "turn the page" on past Republican and Democratic
politics alike, and its recognition that people are just fed up. But that call could never
sustain itself purely on some attacks on lobbyists and the usual timid party nods
toward health care, education and the environment. It was always going to need
more meat on its bones.
In Ohio the working-class people I talked to who were leaning toward Obama or had
decided to vote for him were those who had reviewed the past with workers
competing to outproduce or outconcession each other, and who saw clearly the
pattern of ratcheted down wages and conditions for all. They were people like IBEW
Local 1985 president Jim Repace in North Canton, who remembered his own endless
defenses to his members of Bill Clinton and the Democrats, even as those members
grew increasingly skeptical, and who told me, "Enough is enough." Enough of capital
unleashed, of bridges falling down, levees being breached, cities unable to rebuild
from disaster, the economic base corroding in town after town, full-time workers
losing their homes, severe poverty unabated even in supposed "boom" times, and
government incompetent to do anything but lock people up. Bill Clinton now marches
around lecturing workers on how their mortgages got transformed into stocks,
making oodles of money for speculators, ending the story before it gets to the part
about his own administration's culpability. "Who deregulated the financial industry?"
a worker at the GM Lordstown plant in Ohio said to me, knowing the answer to his
own question but somehow hoping that Hillary would turn on that legacy of her own
"experience" even as she's now turned on NAFTA.
Obama has been foolish not to call for a moratorium on home foreclosures, and it
would be hardly wild-eyed now to take up the AFL-CIO's call for that and reregulation
of the mortgage and credit markets. Or to talk about employment-led growth, instead
of 90s-era growth based on low wages, mad consumption, household debt,
deunionization and the temporary luck of the stock market. Or about immigration in
light of decades' long global economic policies that make it impossible for people to
live in their own countries. The list goes on -- even within the limits of mushy
progressivism that is the outer limit of mainstream political discussion -- for
redefining security and insecurity distinct from the hair-raising style that both Hillary
Clinton and John McCain are so comfortable with. (I should add that as he reassesses
his campaign Obama should definitely sideline Austin Goolsbee, the economic
advisor who gave him NAFTA-gate plus rotten advice on foreclosures.)
I used to think that calling into question the Clinton legacy by charting a break from
Clintonism would be impossible for anyone running for the Democratic nomination.
Maybe it still is. But now that it's clear that the Clintons, who cannot win by the
delegate math, are prepared to destroy the party in Denver by kicking the blacks (its
most loyal base and the most loyal constituency of its greatest support engine,
organized labor), the young, the new voters, the formerly disenchanted, there's a
new fight song, "Anything Goes". All the survivors might start calculating how to fight
President McCain.
JoAnn Wypijewski writes for CounterPunch and other publications. She can be
reached at jwyp@earthlink.net