May 08, 2008
Democrats like to tell the story about Adlai Stevenson, the famously erudite and mild-mannered Illinois senator, and his first campaign against Dwight Eisenhower. When an enthusiastic supporter yelled out, “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person,” Stevenson replied, “Madam, that is not enough. I need a majority.”
Stevenson’s failed campaigns for the White House have haunted Democrats and moderate Republicans ever since. The result is a cornball political process in which sons and daughters of privilege and graduates of our best schools seem to be auditioning for roles on Hee Haw. Save the circumspection and five-dollar words for the biographer; if it’s votes you’re after, it’s time to sidle up to the bar and drop your final “g’s.” It’s called “campainin’.”
So you really can’t blame Hillary Clinton for her attempts to paint Barack Obama as a latter-day Stevenson — as another Illinois pol a little too refined and ivory tower for his, and his country’s, own good. You can even admire the performance as the Wellesley alumna knocks back a brewski and plays to the LMCs — that’s campaign speak for lower middle class. Pundits can point out the absurdity of a one Ivy-trained lawyer accusing another of “elitism.” But Clinton doesn’t need the pundits’ vote: She needs a majority.
The populist ploy is also at the root of Obama’s “pastor problem.” I suspect that his membership in Jeremiah Wright’s church was part of an ill-considered effort to establish street cred with black voters who may have been wary of his cosmopolitan upbringing, Ivy League education, and, let’s be honest, white mother. And Obama may be the first national politician in history to be accused of exaggerating his use of recreational drugs.
Obama is in a funny place when it comes to the elitism charge, and I’m not just talking about his bowling. Part of his appeal to white voters and culturally conservative blacks is his willingness to scold the hip-hop generation and emphasize the importance of education and personal responsibility. And yet Clinton has turned Obama’s message into a liability.
And if that’s what it takes to win elections, her supporters say, so be it. They’re a little tired of Democrats taking the high road, while Republicans take 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
But Clinton is running a risk: If she doesn’t win the nomination, she’ll have handed the GOP Adlai Obama on a platter — or Barack Dukakis in a tank, pick your metaphor. And beyond politics, she’ll have given new credibility to a strain of anti-intellectualism that bodes ill for this country.
Like her husband, Hillary Clinton has always been able to impress with her ability to tackle issues not with slogans but with keen analysis. Her 1990s healthcare reform effort was a political failure, but it was a dead-on prescription for a problem that was bad and has only gotten worse. Populist crap like the Harry and Louise ads undermined what could and should have been health care’s version of the Manhattan Project: a marshalling of the best minds to solve one of our hardest problems.
It’s a very different Hillary Clinton who parries criticism of her gasoline tax-cut proposal by saying, “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists…. We’ve got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans.”
Good politics? Maybe. But don’t think that quote isn’t going to come back to haunt the Democrats when they want to elevate the discussion on global warming, pharmaceutical oversight, healthcare reform, science education, and fiscal responsibility.
I’m the kind of Jew whose antennae go up when he hears talk of intellectual “elites” and “eggheads.” But mostly I’m the kind of American who bristles when someone suggests the quality of one’s values and ideas are inversely proportional to one’s level of education and thoughtfulness.
In her new book, The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby compares John F. Kennedy with Stevenson. Kennedy, she writes, “managed the tricky feat of displaying his intelligence and education — his manner of speaking was every bit as polished and erudite as Stevenson’s — without being seen as a snooty intellectual.” One secret of his presidency, she continues, was his tendency to hire “prominent academics in numbers that provided clear evidence of his comfort in the presence of men (though not women) of ideas.”
Hillary Clinton is a woman of ideas. It’s an indictment of our political process that she has to pretend otherwise.