Ms. Collins is asking about “Hillary for Secretary?” She says that Barack Obama is talking about letting Hillary Clinton be the point person on foreign policy. What happened to the transformative change? Mr. Blow, in “Back to the Future,” says if the Republican Party wants to be modern, it has to go back. Return to fiscal conservativism and ease up on social conservativism. Mr. Herbert says ” ‘Drop Dead’ Is Not an Option,” and that New York City’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s was in no way comparable in scale to the myriad crises facing the country right now. But it’s still instructive. Here’s Ms. Collins:
Hillaryhillaryhillaryhillaryhillary.
Is she going to be Barack Obama’s secretary of state?
It’s been quite a while since we’ve had an opportunity to discuss the Clinton-Obama dynamic, and it does feel good to be back. Forget bankrupt automakers and retail sales numbers. It’s May, and we’re in Indiana arguing about gas prices.
Barack and Joe and Hillary, together again. Just like the YouTube debate, only with more maps.
Obama invited Clinton to Chicago this week for a talk. It isn’t entirely clear whether he offered her the job. But if it was just a courtesy get-together, he really should have tried texting. Now he’s got her fans geared up all over again.
On Friday, a speaker at the City University of New York Women’s Leadership Conference mentioned the story about Hillary’s possible appointment and several hundred women burst into applause. All around the country, the news reminded old Hillary supporters of a nagging pang of disappointment, the feeling that the great election bandwagon had left something behind.
Good luck telling them that it’s actually going to be John Kerry.
While there are many excellent arguments for offering Clinton the job, one of the best is that until now, Senator Kerry was supposed to be the front-runner for State. Does that sound right, people? When one is out searching for the nation’s top diplomat, does it make sense to pick a guy who gets low scores in sociability? Although Kerry has many excellent qualities and his children appear to be very fond of him, if there was a contest for Senator You Would Least Want to Have a Cup of Coffee With, he would be a good bet for top 10. Politicians often brag that they never forget a name, but Kerry is one of those guys who can’t even remember a face.
Clinton is the exact opposite. Plunk her down anywhere and she’ll catch sight of somebody who she met at the Conference of Concerned Problem-Solvers and engage them in a spirited dialogue on what’s going on with that muskrat preservation project in East Engorvia. And she can do that abroad, too, since — as was mentioned a time or two during her campaign — she has already visited 82 countries.
True, there’s 112 countries to go before she runs the table. All the more incentive for her to make sure Obama gets a second term. And on a slightly more elevated level, there’s the fact that the rest of the world would be thrilled with her appointment. She would give our diplomatic outreach a power and gravitas that it hasn’t had for years.
I know, my little Obama hyperpartisans. You spent a year of your lives trying to keep Hillary out of the White House because she voted to let the Bush administration invade Iraq. And now, your man is talking about letting her be the point person on foreign policy. What happened to the transformative change?
We have been through all this before. Candidates who promise to bring everybody together are talking about meeting in the middle. The only people who think Barack Obama is a radical are you and Joe the Plumber.
On Friday, the junior senator from New York was keeping her own counsel. She made a scheduled appearance at the New York State Public Transit Industry Fall Conference in Albany and assured the unexpectedly large delegation of reporters that she was not going to say anything that they would be interested in hearing.
While that did not exactly move the story forward, the event did throw some light on one surprising part of the nation’s current political dynamic. Has anybody noticed how eager Democratic senators seem to be to get out of the Senate? Really, we were under the impression that a safe Senate seat was quite a cushy gig.
The thing is that although there are indeed occasional perks, like fawning staff and an official three-day workweek, a senator’s calendar does tend to get crammed with many variations on the theme of Public Transit Industry Fall Conference. Secretaries of state also go to a lot of boring meetings; however, very few of them take place at an Albany Holiday Inn.
But I digress. Here are four good reasons why Hillary Clinton would be a great pick for secretary of state:
1. She would not let the vice president run our foreign policy. Joe Biden is no Dick Cheney, but we just do not want to go there again. We have scars.
2. Obama could live out his fantasy of following the Abraham Lincoln model and filling his cabinet with a team of rivals without having to make Sarah Palin secretary of commerce.
3. Clinton already has a supply of pantsuits sufficient to get her through six months of peace negotiations in the Middle East without coming home for a change of clothes.
4. She might do a terrific job.
Here’s Mr. Blow:
It must be cold for the Republicans in the shadow of Nov. 4.
They got routed. According to The New York Times, more than three-quarters of the nation’s 3,100 counties voted more Democratic in the presidential race than in 2004. No wonder 1 in 4 Republicans said in an Associated Press/GfK Poll that they were depressed about the results.
So earlier this week, the Republican governors whisked themselves away to Miami to lick their wounds. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota assured the morose assemblage that all was not lost. “We can be both conservative and we can be modern at the same time,” he said.
Yes you can, but first you have to dismantle the current definition of what it means to be conservative.
While the ideals of fiscal conservatism like lowering taxes and smaller government are timeless tenets, strict social conservatism is troglodytic because it desperately clings to outmoded mores and rigid restrictions.
It forces the right to fight the wrong battles. Instead of reaching out to young people and minorities, it gets hung up on keeping Chuck and Larry from getting married.
In 1980, the Republican Party platform spoke at length to blacks and Hispanics, promising to stand “shoulder to shoulder with black Americans” in the fight against racism and to “pursue policies that will help to make opportunities of American life a reality for Hispanics.” That year, Ronald Reagan captured 14 percent of the black vote, becoming the last Republican to do so. He also doubled the Hispanic support that Gerald Ford had enjoyed in the previous election.
The 1980 platform went on to make a specific pitch to the nation’s youth, committing itself to broadening “the involvement of young people in all phases of the political process.” Reagan won 44 percent of the youngest voters in 1980, and that support grew to 61 percent when he was re-elected in 1984. No Republican has seen this level of support from that demographic since.
Instead of building on this success and pitching even bigger tents, they circled the wagons and weaponized morality — the vision gave way to division.
(The 2008 Republican platform doesn’t specifically mention a single minority group. That is except homosexuals because of their “incompatibility … with military service.” However, it does say that it finds discrimination to be immoral. Again, that is except for discrimination against homosexuals.)
To be modern, you have to go back. Return to fiscal conservativism and ease up on social conservativism. Obsess more about controlling spending and less about controlling other people’s bodies. Reach out to poor people in the cities as well as those in the sticks. Make space for minorities, and re-examine the position on immigration.
Being able to disagree without disavowing — now that’s modern.
That, however, doesn’t seem to be the direction they’ve headed off in. Here’s Mr. Herbert:
The famous Daily News headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” ran on Oct. 30, 1975.
New York was on the verge of bankruptcy, and President Ford (who never actually said “drop dead”) had made it clear, after listening to conservative hard-liners both inside and outside of his administration, that he planned to veto any federal rescue plan.
It was yet another case of the worshippers of abstract economic notions (let the markets run their infallible courses) ignoring the potential consequences of their smug certainties.
Felix Rohatyn, the financier who played such a large role in the city’s economic recovery, has told me many times of the economic summit near Paris in November 1975 in which President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of France and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany explained to Mr. Ford that allowing New York to go bankrupt might well light the fuse to an international financial crisis and would foster the idea that America itself was no longer creditworthy.
Mr. Ford was persuaded that the cascading effects of a bankruptcy were potentially catastrophic and could not be risked. He relented. Loan guarantees were made; the city went through the long ordeal of getting its financial house in order; the loans were repaid; and New York not only recovered but thrived.
The city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s was in no way comparable in scale to the myriad crises facing the country right now. But it’s still instructive. The ideological hard-liners have now cast their collectively jaundiced eye on Detroit’s automakers. Their response to the very real danger that General Motors might crumble into bankruptcy is: C’est la vie.
Unlike President Ford, Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican of Alabama — to cite just one example — is not troubled by thoughts of cascading effects, such as the toll of domino-like business failures and swelling unemployment moving like a toxic virus through an economy that is already ill.
“The financial situation facing the Big Three is not a national problem, but their own problem,” he said.
Whoa!
I can agree that it’s impossible to make a positive case for the backward, self-destructive practices of the auto industry over many years. (Just as it was difficult to defend the practices that led to New York’s fiscal crisis.) But in the current environment, allowing one or more of the Big Three to go bankrupt would be like offering up your nose to Sweeney Todd to spite your face.
It’s not just General Motors or Chrysler or Ford. The U.S. auto industry is the cornerstone of American manufacturing. It supports millions of jobs, directly or indirectly, in a vast array of businesses.
Start with the thousands of parts in each vehicle. They are produced by suppliers across the country, from one coast to the other. Those supplies have to be manufactured, packaged and transported. Truck drivers, railway systems and shipping companies are involved.
And, of course, there are dealers everywhere. And the auto repair industry. And the insurance industry. And vast systems of advertising supporting every kind of job you can imagine, from messengers to accountants to filmmakers and beyond. All of that advertising funnels absolutely crucial revenues to television, magazines, newspapers — you name it.
If G.M., which is on life support, or Ford or Chrysler were to go bankrupt, the reverberations would kill the jobs of entire armies of American workers. It would undermine the standard of living of hundreds of thousands of families and shutter the entrances of untold numbers of small and intermediate businesses.
Senator Shelby might want to do some homework before embarrassing himself again with the absurd comment that the crisis facing the Big Three is not a national problem.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, a state that is already writhing in pain from the auto industry’s troubles, would tell Mr. Shelby that the industry “supports 1 in every 10 jobs in the country.”
It’s easy to demonize the American auto industry. It has behaved with the foresight of a crack addict for years. But even when people set their own houses on fire, we still dial 9-1-1, hoping to save lives, salvage what we can and protect the rest of the neighborhood.
This whole matter needs some intensive thought. At the moment, Washington has tremendous leverage over the failing auto industry. The government should craft a rescue plan that is both tough and very, very smart. That means dragging the industry (kicking and screaming, no doubt) into the 21st century by insisting on ironclad commitments to design and develop vehicles that make sense economically and that serve the nation’s long-term energy security requirements.
What I would like to see is creative thinking on both ends of the bargain. Let the smartest minds design a bailout that sparks a creative revolution in the industry. Think of it as project synergy.
Time’s wasting.
