Senator Clinton:       

Change from Within

or More of the Same?

By Hank Edson

Thanks to our lucky stars, The Declaration of Independence did not justify compromise; it did not state that “we have found a way to work with the monarchists, such that we will be severing our ties with our parent corporation and spinning-off a new elite, which will hence forth direct slavery operations under a more liberalized profit sharing program.”

Hillary Clinton is the subject of Newsweek’s cover story this week. Newsweek’ s portrait of her is largely flattering describing her as a politician whose life has been committed to making change within the system. In the final question of her interview, Jonathan Darman asks, “What about the biggest difference between Hillary Clinton, the decision maker of today, and Hillary Clinton, the decision maker of 15 years ago? This was Senator Clinton’s response:

“I have a much deeper understanding of what American leadership at home and abroad has to mean for the 21st century. I am much more experienced in dealing with my own government and understand its potential and its limitations. I believe that my commitment to issues that I care deeply about is just as strong as it was not only 15 years ago, but 35 years ago. My commitment and understanding of the process that has to be pursued in order to make change in America is just much greater than it would have been in the past.”

With this answer, Clinton is making three points about her candidacy. First, in 15 years she has gained a lot of valuable experience. Second, she has learned from her mistakes that you have to make change happen within the limitations of the system. And third, despite this pragmatic realism, she is still a committed idealist fighting the good fight.

As far as these three points go, I think they are valid reasons to support Hillary Clinton. But before we jump the gun, there are three other considerations on which our support depends.

First, how does Clinton compare to the other candidates on each of these three points? Is she the most experienced leader, the most effective insider, and/or the most idealistic candidate?

Second, what changes have occurred in the last 15 years that she is not discussing? For example, what does it mean for her candidacy when Rupert Murdoch throws her fundraising parties and the former members of her husband’s administration have all become K-Street lobbyists? Does “change from within” the system, mean degradation of one’s integrity, surrender to corrupt power brokers, and assimilation within a government culture that has propelled our nation into a deep class divide not seen since the Gilded Age?

Third, does the implied thesis Clinton is asserting really hold true for her and is the thesis even valid at all? When she says that she understands the U.S. government’s potential and its limitations, she is claiming that she knows how to push for change, but not too hard. She knows how to make it more than it is without causing more harm than good. This seems to me to be a valid criterion for the American people to evaluate in choosing a candidate.

As a progressive liberal idealist, I am not against dealing pragmatically with reality. I am prepared for both possibilities: (1) that more net good can be accomplished within the system, or (2) that the system is irreparably corrupt and must be changed from outside.

Generally, I hold to the position that both means of change should be pursued simultaneously and that, as a matter of political strategy, the outsiders should constantly be challenging the insiders to prove the system is not completely broken. This challenge should not be limited to political rhetoric but should include direct action that leaves the insiders little choice but to improve the state of their affairs.

As the perennial outsider Bob Dylan sings to the insiders, “Your old road is rapidly agin'. Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand for the times they are a-changin'!” The point here is that perhaps, indeed, Senator Clinton can lend a hand. Sometimes positive change does come faster from within than it does from outside.

Thus, we are faced with the question: Does Clinton’s thesis really hold true for her? This is the question I really want to address. I have my own thesis about change from within, which I think helps us evaluate whether a candidate for the presidency of the United States can perform the function of an effective insider.

It’s a simple test really: All the candidate has to be willing to do is to use the bully pulpit to advance democratic principles instead of to justify compromising them. Even if the candidate must make compromises in achieving change through the political process, she must be unwavering in making our political discourse about our ideals.

Let me explain what I mean by this, and why it is important, by using a concrete example: The Declaration of Independence. This example is actually highly relevant to candidate Clinton. When our founding fathers declared that “all men are created equal,” they used their bully pulpit to make our political discourse about our democratic ideals. In an “ideal” world, it turns out, not just all men, but all people, are created equal.

At the time our founding fathers made this declaration, however, women were not alone in being excluded from the equality of humanity. Many of our founding fathers owned other men and held them in the state of explicitly asserted inferiority we call slavery. To say the least, their words did not match their deeds. When it came time to employ a political process to write the Constitution that would frame our new government, our founding fathers further proved themselves extraordinarily adept at compromising their ideals.

In our two most sacred national documents, our founding fathers displayed incredible self-contradiction. In the first, they wrote, “all men are created equal” and in the second they wrote that political representation would be apportioned “by adding to the whole number of free persons…three-fifths of all other persons.” In the math of The Declaration of Independence, one person plainly does not equal three-fifths of another person. The three-fifths statement, found in article 1, section 2 of our Constitution, was accompanied in section 9 by a prohibition against Congress even discussing the abolishment of slavery for another 50 years.

Thus, if you suspect that the candidates this year are all hypocrites, at least they are in good company. Our founding fathers were hypocrites, too. What may distinguish the greatness of our founding fathers from the corrupt inadequacy or our current leaders, however, is the fact that they understood their duty to advance democratic ideals from the bully pulpit even if they could not achieve them through the political process.

Because our founding fathers asserted an ideal equation from the bully pulpit, the American people have been able to test its principle over and over again throughout our history and demand we advance our application of it. Thanks to our lucky stars, The Declaration of Independence did not justify compromise; it did not state that “we have found a way to work with the monarchists, such that we will be severing our ties with our parent corporation and spinning-off a new elite, which will hence forth direct slavery operations under a more liberalized profit sharing program.”

Instead, it said, “All men are created equal.” This positive assertion of principle gave our founding fathers reason to be proud of themselves and it gave the American people a foundation on which to build their own liberty by challenging the government’s failure to live up to that principle. Had that principle never been declared from the bully pulpit of American government, outsiders like Susan B. Anthony, Lucrecia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton would have struggled perhaps for centuries to make it possible for Hillary Clinton to run for President.

Fortunately, instead, Mott and Stanton helped organize the famous Seneca Falls Convention where Stanton helped draft the “Declaration of Sentiments,” which was modeled after The Declaration of Independence and which stated that “all men and women are created equal.”

It took another 72 years to win the right to vote and another 88 years for a woman to become the front-runner in a presidential campaign. All this time the outsiders were working hard, but the insiders were justifying the compromise of our democratic principles. That’s what happens when you choose the wrong candidates.

With a little practice, however, it’s not hard to become quite good at distinguishing those politicians who use the bully pulpit to advance democratic principles and those who use it to justify compromising them. There is an obvious difference between rhetoric that promotes our understanding of the truths of our humanity and rhetoric that becomes muddled in discussion of the “limitations” of the system and that equates dysfunction with a “reality” that is beyond our power to change.

Returning to the first two factors I raised as important to the people in deciding who to support in the presidential campaign, we should also employ them in evaluating the quality of Senator Clinton’s bully pulpit rhetoric. That is, (1) even if Clinton does use the bully pulpit to advance democratic principles, we should ask whether the other candidates do it better, and (2) we should also ask if the actual compromises she makes are merely pragmatic or whether they are actually corrupt. If she is more corrupt in her use of the political process and less effective in her use of the bully pulpit, then we ought to support the one who out-shines her on both counts.

Thus, with respect to Clinton’s candidacy, or anyone’s candidacy, the people have quite a job to do. First, we must support only candidates that will open the door for outsiders to advance democratic principles by promoting them from the bully pulpit. Second, we must make sure that those candidates we support are not only the most powerful advocates of our democratic principles in the political discourse, but also that their conduct in the political process, if pragmatic, is not out-and-out corrupt.

In the final assessment, my problem with Senator Clinton is that she tends to fall at the first hurdle. A politician who campaigns on making change happen within the system, rather than just on making change happen, is not advancing democratic principles from the bully pulpit, but justifying compromise instead. Senator Clinton seems to be more focused on justifying her own pragmatism (or corruption) rather than on rallying the public to mobilize its idealism. In this manner, Clinton fails the true test of leadership. If she does not offer the people a platform on which to advance their own interests, why should we trust her to advance them for us? Hillary Clinton has simply not gained my trust.

There’s still time for her to make a change, however. Her experience, her wisdom, and her insider perspective could be extremely effective tools for change. She just has to be willing to truly speak out for what we all really believe.

Copyright © Hank Edson 2007