People Write About Hillary

Conor Friedersdorf over at The Atlantic listens to the Terry Gross interview and thinks that Hillary CLinton has a Gay-Marriage problem if she has a primary. A primary against an opponent who has a longer track record of supporting gay marriage:

In a primary, Clinton could be forced to explain a longtime position that a significant part of that Democratic political coalition now views as suspect or even bigoted. Most famously, the Silicon Valley left forced the ouster of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for a 2008 donation he made to an anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative. That same year, Clinton ran for president while openly opposing gay marriage. If she is to be believed, she also opposed gay marriage as recently as 2013, long after a majority of Americans already held a more gay-friendly position. Would the subset of Democrats who thought 2008 opposition to gay marriage should prevent a man from becoming CEO in 2013 really support the 2015 presidential campaign of a woman who openly opposed gay marriage until last year?

So then the question is — who would primary her who would have a longer track record of supporting gay marriage? Elizabeth Warren? Serious question — I don’t know. The political class has been slow to embrace gay marriage until it started looking inevitable. Getting out in front of this bit of civil rights was potentially toxic, so most folks waited for permission from the public to be openly supportive. At any rate, if there is a primary, Friedersdorf finds how Hillary supporters will rationalize her lack of support via Andrew Sullivan:

She was the second most powerful person in an administration in a critical era for gay rights. And in that era, her husband signed the HIV travel ban into law (it remained on the books for 22 years thereafter), making it the only medical condition ever legislated as a bar to even a tourist entering the US. Clinton also left gay service-members in the lurch, doubling the rate of their discharges from the military, and signed DOMA, the high watermark of anti-gay legislation in American history. Where and when it counted, the Clintons gave critical credibility to the religious right’s jihad against us. And on the day we testified against DOMA in 1996, their Justice Department argued that there were no constitutional problems with DOMA at all (the Supreme Court eventually disagreed).

What I’d like to hear her answer is whether she regrets that period and whether she will ever take responsibility for it. But she got pissed when merely asked how calculated her position on this was. Here’s my guess: Unlike Obama, she was personally deeply uncomfortable with this for a long time and politically believed the issue was a Republican wedge issue to torment the Clintons rather than a core civil rights cause. I was editor of TNR for five years of the Clintons, aggressively writing and publishing articles in favor of marriage equality and military service, and saw the Clintons’ irritation with and hostility to gay activists up close. Under my editorship, we were a very early 1991 backer of Clinton – so I sure didn’t start out prejudiced against them. They taught me that skepticism all by themselves, and mainly by lying all the time.

So when did she evolve? Maybe in the middle 2000s. Was political calculation as big an influence as genuine personal wrestling? She’s a Clinton. They poll-tested where to go on vacation. Of course it was. But she’s also a human being and probably came around personally as well. She’s not a robot, after all. But I think of her position as the same as the eponymous gay rights organization the Clintons controlled in the 1990s, the Human Rights Campaign. As long as marriage equality hurt the Democrats, they were against it. Now it may even hurt Republicans, they’re for it. So Hillary is for it now.

We’ve just got to hope the polling stays strong.

Interesting. He also makes my own point that this could be a genuine issue for her if the GOP had been doing something other than obstructing Obama over the past few years.

Daniel Larison reads Hillary Clinton’s book and finds that she learned nothing from the Iraq war and still presents as the liberal hawk she was before. However:

Like so many other Democratic hawks, Clinton has discovered that she can avoid revisiting any earlier assumptions about U.S. foreign policy or her views about the U.S. role in the world as long as she disavows past support for the Iraq war. So she does the bare minimum to adapt to the changes in her party and in the country while retaining the same bad hawkish and conventional instincts that led her to support the invasion in 2002. Clinton hasn’t learned anything important from getting the Iraq vote wrong, and we have every reason to expect that her future foreign policy decisions would be marred by the same hawkish mistakes that have characterized her record up until now.

What does this mean? It means that if you are ready for the US to stand down on its world policeman role, you need to insist on answers to questions that might illuminate that from her. Because this is apparently what you’ll be hearing:

“I had this sense that I had voted for it, and we had all these young men and women over there, and it was a terrible battle environment,” Clinton said. “I knew some of the young people who were there and I was very close to one Marine lieutenant who lead a mixed platoon of Americans and Iraqis in the first battle for Fallujah.”

“So I felt like I couldn’t break faith with them,” she continued. “Maybe that doesn’t make sense to anybody else but me, but that’s how I felt about it. So I kept temporizing and I kept avoiding saying it because I didn’t want there to be any feeling that I was backing off or undercutting my support for this very difficult mission in Iraq.”

Charming, but what about the faith she broke with the people who opposed this thing?

Then there’s the double standard, which I suppose we’ve got another few years to listen to. Media Matters asks why the press went crazy in characterizing Hillary Clinton as “testy” or listing gaffes that weren’t when Chris Christie famously and routinely berates everyone in front of him with nary a “testy” peep from the press:

But apparently she was supposed to roll over. Because by standing up for herself (while never raising her voice), Clinton was breathlessly tagged as combative and unnerved in the wake of a mildly contentious back-and-forth:

Instapundit called her “testy,” as did MSNBC, and New York Magazine does, too, also writing that “Hillary won’t say she evolved on gay marriage.” The Wall Street Journal also picks up the “testy” line, while the New York Daily News prefers “lashes out” in a “tense” interview. Mediaite says she “snaps” at NPR’s interviewer. Oh, and Politico prefers “testy.”

The media message to Clinton was clear last week: You can’t lose your cool when dealing with the press. You can’t try to intimidate reporters. And you certainly can’t try to bluster them off tough questions. Those are the guidelines established for Clinton if she plans to run to become the country’s first woman president.

Who is allowed to do all those things? Chris Christie, for one.

Prior to the eruption of his lane-closing controversy in January, the Republican governor of New Jersey and presidential hopeful had spent four years basking in the Beltway media glow specifically because of his eagerness to unleash combative, insulting bromides, including some against the press. It showed he was authentic!

It’s going to be interesting, that’s for sure.