On courage and compromise

Hillary::

So when I hear Senator Obama talk about that, I wonder which fights he wouldn't fight. Would he have not fought to get to a balanced budget and a surplus and help create 22 million new jobs? Would he have not fought to get assault weapons off the street and get them out of the hands of, you know, criminals and gang members? You never hear the specifics. It's all this kind of abstract, general talk about how we all need to get along. I want to get along, and I have gotten along in the Senate. I will work with Republicans to find common cause whenever I can, but I will also stand my ground, because there are fights worth having.

I could snarkily ask Sen. Clinton about her decision and her husband's not to fight on gays in the military, not to fight for real health care reform, not to fight President Bush's rush to war in Iraq or Iran, and I could snarkily ask whether she expects us to believe that the Clinton-era welfare reform (and attendant BS about "the era of Big Government") are supposed to be seen as anything but a capitulation to the Gingrich congress. But I won't. Instead, I offer a bit of Abraham Lincoln's wisdom, on this 199th anniversary of his birth.

In his first debate with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said, quite rightly:

With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.

Winning requires shifting public attitudes. That doesn't mean surrender, but it also means drawing people out, and engaging them, so that debates don't fall into the well-trod ruts of latter days.

Obama worked in the same state legislature where Lincoln cut his teeth, and showed himself to be shrewd and effective in maneuvering his enemies until they were his friends. No bill mandating that murder interrogations be videotaped, nor one reforming of the state's broken death penalty, could pass without the district attorneys' and the PBA's support, and the police were against those ideas when he first started working on the. But through hard work, he brought them on board, and brought around Republicans and leaders of his own party. In the end, the PBA were so happy with him that they endorsed his run for the Senate. Hilzoy has cataloged a number of Obama's other legislative victories, places where he has stood against great odds for the right thing.

Here, we may as well note that one of those stands, one that was both courageous and prescient, was his open opposition to the misbegotten war in Iraq. There, too, Lincoln's words bring us wisdom. This passage comes from a letter he wrote to a business partner during legislative battles over the Mexican-American war, opposing pre-emptive war based on bad intelligence:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, — "I see no probability of the British invading us"; but he will say to you, "Be silent: I see it, if you don't."

The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

In October of 2002, Obama said:

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

While he fought that fight on the streets of Chicago, Hillary Clinton stood in the well of the Senate and voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. She's not the one to lecture anyone on political courage.