posted 2007/02/11 at 17:38
Clinton Parries Iraq Questions in New Hampshire (via AP/Yahoo! News)
Ever since Hillary formally announced her candidacy for the Presidency, I've been bothered by the fact that people on the left haven't been making such a big deal out of the sudden change in her public statements about Iraq shortly after the midterm elections. Back in 2003 Hillary was nearly Lieberman-esque in her trumpeting of why the United States should invade Iraq, and her statements didn't seem to change all that much until the war's popularity finally plummeted to chilling levels. Now all of a sudden we're already in the 2008 presidential campaign season, and Hillary and her cronies seem to be working overtime to position her as the best anti-war candidate.
This got me to thinking about political conversions and transformations, and just how it is that we can know when a politician shifting on a given issue is a genuine change of heart or a calculated ploy to get more voters. In the case of Hillary's seeming turnaround on Iraq, I find it hard to believe that this isn't a ploy on her part, given her and her husband's involvement with the DLC and everything they've done over the past fifteen years to turn the Democratic Party into a centrist party and squelch truly left-wing politics in America. In other cases, though, things don't feel like they're so clean-cut.
Let's take Dennis Kucinich as an example. Although Kucinich has a well-earned reputation for being one of the most left-wing members of the Democratic Party (and, in my opinion, one of the few Democrats who still fights for the principles the party was founded on), up until he started contemplating his first Presidential run back in 2002 his voting record way very pro-life, in keeping with his Catholic faith. However, he then switched to voting mostly pro-choice, which some people portrayed as him flip-flopping to bring his voting record into line with the Democratic Party on one of its most defining issues. I believe Kucinich, though, when he says that he realized that he shouldn't allow his personal opposition to abortion interfere with the decisions women make over their own bodies.
Kucinich may not be the right person for me to look at, though, given how much of a fan of his I am. Perhaps looking at Arianna Huffington would be a better example. I generally believe the reasons she gave for her switching from right-wing to left-wing politics around the turn of the century, mainly because she spoke convincingly of how she first believed that the private sphere could take care of social problems, then through first-hand experience realized that private enterprise -- at least the kind we have here in America -- was simply too concerned with preserving their wealth and power to look out for the less fortunate. However, during the 2003 Californial Gubernatorial recall, Arianna suddenly shifted from a firm independent and friend of the Green Party to a Democratic Party appeaser, and none of the explanations she's given for that change have ever satisfied me.
Not that I know Arianna personally or anything like that, but my suspicion is that Arianna didn't want to find herself disinvited from all the posh dinner parties and stuff her fat-cat Democrat friends were holding, so she joined the majority "Ralph Nader caused 9.11 and the PATRIOT Act" wing of the Democratic Party. Arianna still points out how the Democratic party should move further to the left, and I admire her for that, but if Hillary gets the nomination in 2008 then her Huffington Post blog is going to be Hillary '08 Central, and that any Green Party or other left-leaning third-party candidate is going to be savaged for "helping to elect" the Republican nominee.
I hold no illusions of an American past where the voting population didn't view their politicans with a healthy degree of cynicism, but I don't think that any careful observer of America would dare to say that this country's cynicism hasn't doubled and then redoubled over the past thirty years. That being said, I shudder to think that America has become so cynical that politicans -- or other public figures -- changing their stance on a given issue is only to be seen as an attempt to gain publicity or support. Anyone of voting age who has never changed their opinion on any subject is a fool at best, a zealot at worst. Nevertheless, anecdotal and historical evidence alike give us all good reason to be skeptical whenever a politican's public stance on a hot-button issue suddenly changes. How are we to tell when such changes might be genuine, though?
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon