The Unbearable Lightness of the 2016 Democratic Field

The Unbearable Lightness of the 2016 Democratic Field

By Noah Rothman
June 4, 2015
Commentary Magazine


With the West losing a war against an abhorrent foe abroad, one that seeks to convert Americans in order to terrorize the United States from within, and an anemic economic recovery at home, there is a wealth of gravely serious issues for the immense field of aspiring 2016 candidates to tackle. You would not know that, however, from the conspicuously frivolous matters that appear to occupy the minds of the 2016 field of Democratic presidential candidates.

On Wednesday, Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democratic former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee announced a quixotic bid to challenge the inevitable Hillary Clinton for his party’s presidential nomination. Naturally, he launched his underdog campaign by focusing on the issue at the forefront of American minds: the nation’s stubborn refusal to adopt the metric system.

Chafee’s resurrection of an issue so dear to President Jimmy Carter’s heart might not be such a bad way to ingratiate himself to his fellow Democrats. After all, America would be just another metric nation rather than an exceptional one that embraces customary units had Ronald Reagan not disbanded the U.S. Metric Board in 1982.

Chafee insisted that his proposal was a way in which the United States might make amends to the rest of the world for its stumbles in the realm of foreign policy over the last 14 years, but he immediately proceeded to make one of his own. In his speech, Chafee refused to rule out the prospect of preemptively surrendering to the Islamic State insurgents and their expanding Islamic caliphate. “We’re coming to grips with who these people are and what they want,” Chafee said. “Let’s wage peace in this new American century.” The moral vacuity of Chafee’s call for a retreat from the halfhearted war President Obama only reluctantly committed to fighting in the face of genocide, slavery, and the wanton destruction of shared human heritage in the Middle East is breathtakingly pusillanimous.

But in advocating capitulation, Chafee is at least addressing great issues of statecraft. That’s more than you can say for many of his competitors.

Tilting at long forgotten windmills appears to be a favored pastime for Democratic presidential aspirants. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and self-described socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders are equally concerned with refighting the battles of the past. Both have stressed the injustice of the fact that no one in the financial sector was convicted or even charged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Just what those charges would be and whom they might have sought indictments against will, however, remain a mystery. When they are not railing against the weather, these candidates have also devoted extensive time and energy to denouncing the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement and the trade promotional authority the Senate recently provided to their party’s leader upon request. In this way, Sanders and O’Malley get to litigate the residual grievances that have festered since the NAFTA free trade agreement went into effect 22 years ago. Never mind the fact that two polls released at the end of the month show that majorities are both favorable toward this agreement and believe free global trade benefits the country as a whole.

But it is former Secretary of State Clinton, her party’s most likely standard-bearer, who traffics most frequently in trivialities and vagaries. In lieu of interviews, Clinton continues to give “groundbreaking” speeches in which she makes wild calls for solutions to problems that simply don’t exist. “Her speech will be her interview,” Clinton’s press team gallingly informed reporters this week ahead of yet another grand oration. To keep the media’s attention, she issues unrealizable calls to action galvanizing her supporters for a fight against a momentous injustice they hadn’t known existed until Clinton invented it.

On Thursday, in yet another landmark address, Clinton will call for extended early voting that would last no less than 20 days prior to an election. But why 20? Why not a full month? Or maybe two months? After all, the great scourge of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement may not be ameliorated with such an arbitrary cut-off period.

Predictably, Clinton’s call to arms will inspire approbation from the traditional centers of Democratic self-validation. The New York Times editorial board or the like will spring to action, wonder why they had never recognized the marginalization of voters who can’t remember when Election Day is or to secure their absentee ballot within two weeks of that constitutionally-mandated voting period, and declare Clinton the civil rights champion of her time for confronting this underrated issue.

But this isn’t the only grand pronouncement candidate Clinton has delivered on the trail in which she declared the greatest scourge of our generation was one that you had carelessly overlooked. She also occupies her time making lofty demands on lawmakers or the culture in general that will never be realized.

Clinton has called for a constitutional amendment to limit the freedoms in the First so that anyone who wants to make a movie critical of her 60 days out from an election will be prohibited from doing so. Unseemly? Sure. Unrealistic? Absolutely. Such a proposition couldn’t pass a Democratic-led Senate, much less secure two-thirds of the vote of Congress and be ratified by 37 states. But it is not your lot to reason why. In another speech, Clinton called for the end of the era of “mass incarceration,” a blight ushered in by the criminal justice reforms her husband signed into law and for which she lobbied for as first lady. But what does that even mean? And how is this proposition to be achieved? Those and other valid questions were drowned out by the crowd’s deafening applause.

These are not serious policy proposals; they’re positioning statements. Sound bites designed to generate favorable press coverage without all the hassle of having to explain what they mean and how they will be achieved in necessarily granular detail.

Polls have consistently shown that issues like the stalling economic recovery, the federal debt and deficit, the unsettled fate of ObamaCare, education policy, terrorism, the deteriorating international security environment, and illegal immigration dominate the minds of most voters. You might think the slate of Democratic presidential candidates would deign to convince voters that they are the most competent and serious-minded figure in the field. The fact that they are aggressively avoiding these issues is an indication of the headwinds the president’s party will face in their effort to secure a third consecutive term in the White House.

Article Link to Commentary Magazine:

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/06/04/2016-democraitic-field/

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