Hillary Clinton Should Be The Next Ted Kennedy

Hillary Clinton would be more useful to America as a progressive Senator than as a centrist president, which is how she has positioned herself in contrast to the more liberal Barack Obama and John Edwards. Obviously Clinton still hopes to win the White House. But if she loses the nomination or the November election, would she, freed from presidential ambitions, be willing to reposition herself as the progressive she once was and spend the rest of her career building a solid legislative record? Some think its too late -- she's already established herself as a triangulating centrist. Others, including some of her long-term friends, think she's still a closet progressive. If so, she should learn from the example of Ted Kennedy, who has been the most effective progressive in the Senate for many years -- before and especially after he lost the Democratic nomination for president to incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Like Hillary, Ted Kennedy got his start in mainstream politics because of family connections. His brother John was elected president in 1960. Two years later, Ted, then 30 and with few accomplishments of his own, was elected to his brother's Massachusetts seat in the Senate. When John was assassinated in 1963, Robert - the next in line - assumed the Kennedy mantel. He was elected senator from New York in 1964 but lacked the patience to be an effective legislator. He had few legislative achievements during his four years as a senator. His staff and his wife Ethel pushed him to run for president. After Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota won 42% of the vote against incumbent President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, revealing that LBJ was vulnerable to defeat, Kennedy jumped into the contest, energized by the twin issues of opposition to the war in VietNam and poverty at home. Had he not been killed in June 1968, after winning the California primary, it is likely the Bobby would have won his party's nomination and defeated Richard Nixon for the White House.

With both brothers John and Robert dead, Ted Kennedy became the heir apparent and family elder. Not surprisingly, he was under enormous pressure to run for president. In 1980, he decided to wage an insurgent campaign against the incumbent, fellow Democrat Jimmy Carter. Early polls showed him ahead of Carter, but Kennedy seemed a reluctant candidate, unable to articulate his reason for running and lacking the requisite fire-in-the-belly. Labor unions, feminists, environmentalists and other progressives rallied to his campaign, but his heart wasn't in it. Kennedy won ten presidential primaries, but Carter won 24, helped by the Iran hostage crisis, which temporarily boosted his popularity. Kennedy bowed out, then delivered an inspiring speech at the Democratic convention in New York.

From the beginning, Kennedy resolved to make his mark in the Senate. And he has. He has served in that body for 45 years - longer than all but two other senators in history. In that time, has been the progressive stalwart. He's learned the rules of legislating, recruited a brilliant and loyal staff, and demonstrated the patience to work the Senate floor, build personal relationships with colleagues, including those he disagrees with, and work closely with progressive activist groups to sponsor and enact important legislation.

Kennedy's success has not simply been his voting record, but his leadership and his willingness to ally himself with activist unions, environmentalists, feminists, civil rights crusaders, immigrants, senior citizen groups, and others. He has consistently been an inspiring orator, lifting crowds up with his fervor and his obviously sincere passion for the underdog and the ordinary worker. He has been the most persistent and articulate advocate for universal health insurance, long before it was a mainstream issue. He has been the strongest advocate in the Senate for the poor and disadvantaged, sponsoring and helping enact laws to provide job training, heating assistance, teacher training, bilingual education, and health care. He has been a champion of abortion rights, labor law reform, raising the minimum wage, voting rights, immigrant rights, Head Start, financial assistance for college students, clean air and water bills, the Americans for Disabilities Act, and the Family and Medical Leave Act. He voted against the Iraq war resolution and has been a leading opponent of right-wing nominees on the Supreme Court.

When the Democrats have been in the majority, Kennedy has been an outstanding offensive quarterback. When his party was relegated to the minority, Kennedy learned how to maneuver to stop bad legislation from getting adopted. He has occasionally miscalculated, such as his alliance with President Bush on the No Child Left Behind Act, but more often he succeeds by moving the ball forward, showing extraordinary legislative skill. He knows when to hold out and when to forge compromises when needed to get things passed.

Other senators -- including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Barbara Boxer of California, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and the late Paul Wellstone of Minnesota -- may be equally progressive, but no senator has Kennedy's track record of legislative accomplishments on behalf of those Americans left out of the mainstream.

When someone finally writes an honest history of the Kennedy family, it should be Ted Kennedy who gets the most pages -- not only because he outlived his older brothers, but because he accomplished much more in American politics than either John or Robert.

Can Hillary Clinton follow Kennedy's example? As a Senator, she hunkered down, learned the ropes, and built personal ties with fellow Democrats and some Republicans. She tried to walk the tightrope between being a media star and being a freshman Senator who wasn't supposed to bask in the limelight and outshine her more experienced colleagues, despite being part of a political dynasty.
But from moment she stepped foot on the Senate floor, everyone knew that she had larger ambitions. No doubt her self-image is not as a legislative long distance runner like Kennedy. Every backslap, legislative compromise, and public speech was geared to building her legislative resume and her media image for the bigger contest for the White House. It was obvious that she viewed the Senate as a steppingstone to running for President.

Her candidacy for President makes sense only because she spent eight years as an activist First Lady and then, since 2001, as an increasingly moderate Democrat in the Senate, calculating her votes with an eye toward an eventual run for the White House. (In the National Journal's rankings, based on their 2006 voting records, Clinton's composite score of 70.2 on economic, social and foreign policy issues put her as the 32nd most liberal Senator. Kennedy, with a 93.7, ranked third, behind Richard Durbin of Illinois and Barbara Boxer of California. Barack Obama ranked 10th).

But if she loses this bid for the White House, will she then be free to be what some of her friends believe is the "real" Hillary -- a progressive? It may be too late. She may be too stuck in the middle of the road to change course. She's become the voice of the Democratic Party establishment, the triangulating centrist who is too tied to Wall Street and big business to be a champion for working people, the poor, environmentalists, and opponents of American militarism. If, however, she has the courage of her one-time convictions, she could be an effective champion for change.

In her presidential campaign, she focuses on her accomplishments as an agent for change as First Lady and as a first-term Senator. She takes credit for a handful of legislative achievements. She rarely talks about her political activism in college, law school, and while serving as Arkansas' first lady. Although she was never a 1960s radical, she absorbed many of her generation's ideas about the need for progressive change.

After Rev. Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, Clinton, then a student government leader at Wellesley College, helped organize a two-day strike and worked closely with the few black students on campus to organize teach-ins and other activities to pressure the college to recruit more black students and faculty. That year, she traveled to New Hampshire for Sen. Eugene McCarthy's anti-war campaign for president. She wrote her senior thesis in 1969 about the legendary Saul Alinsky, the Chicago activist who is considered the founding father of community organizing. As part of her research, Clinton traveled to Chicago to interview Alinsky. She concluded her report by placing him in the political company of Socialist Eugene Debs, poet Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King Jr. - describing Alinsky as a champion of "the most radical of political faiths - democracy." (For several years, Wellesley agreed to keep the thesis under lock and key, in response to a request from Clinton. It is now available on-line and in the college library.)

She entered Yale Law School in 1969, one of the handful of women in her class. There, she worked with the attorney for Black Panthers accused of murder and clerked one summer for the left-wing lawyer Robert Treuhaft in Berkeley. In 1970, with a grant from the Law Student Civil Rights Research Council, she worked for the Washington Research Project, where she became friends with civil rights lawyer Marian Wright Edelman and began her ongoing interest in children's rights. Later, when Edelman founded the Children's Defense Fund, a liberal research and lobby group for children, Hillary Clinton to serve on its board from 1976 to 1992, and as its chair from 1986 to 1991.

In 1972, she and Bill Clinton, whom she'd met at Yale, worked on George McGovern's anti-war campaign for president. In 1974, while Bill was teaching law in Arkansas, she worked for Joan Doar, the House Judiciary Committee's special counsel, on the impeachment of Richard Nixon. When she got married in 1973, she continued to use her maiden name, Hillary Rodham, as did many feminists of her generation. But in 1980, when Bill lost his re-election bid for Governor of Arkansas and they both tried to adopt a more moderate image, she began using the name Clinton.

In 1977, Jimmy Carter appointed her chair of the Legal Services Corporation, a federal anti-poverty program. Although LSC was then under attack by conservatives for providing legal help not only to individuals but also to grassroots community groups, she successfully lobbied Congress to increase the LSC budget. At the same time, as the wife of the Arkansas governor, she served on the board of the state's most powerful company, Wal-Mart.

Is that early progressive Hillary so far in the past that it would be like waking up the dead? Does she still have those progressive instincts and harbor those progressive thoughts? Can we imagine a Senator Hillary Clinton, now 60 years old, spending the next twenty or so years in the Senate, challenging big business on workers' rights, global warming, tax reform, universal health care, and militarism? Could she find satisfaction in being a voice for a new wave a feminism, gay rights, and civil liberties? Does she have the patience to dig in for the long haul and establish herself as a champion for the underdog? Or will she need to spend the rest of her life justifying her husband's DLC-style moderation and her own track record as a centrist Democrat from a liberal state?

Hillary Clinton has another twenty years to define and establish her legacy. Right now, she is a political "could-have-been" - her husband's sounding board and chief advisor, an effective but not great senate legislator, and, most likely, a failed candidate for president. Starting next year, perhaps freed from further presidential ambitions, and as part of a larger (and perhaps filibuster-proof) Democratic majority in the Congress, Clinton could dig in and begin to set a new course for herself and for her legacy. As she gains in longevity, seniority, and experience, she should take the senior Senator from Massachusetts as her model.

Comments

[jwod]

Looking for 'truth, justice and the American Way'? Well, at least the last appears to suffice for most of you guys. The 'truth' is that Hilary is probably the most experienced, and with Bill, has the best coach. But her election will guarantee 4-8 more years of partisan-based frustration, especially if we won't vote in a Democratic Congress. Obama is the most likable and electable but perhaps another Carter-type lightweight. Edwards is attractive, but without any administrative/foreign relations background and only one less-than-illustrious legislative term, electorally he's an empty suit. I'm willing to roll the dice on Obama, but only after we see if Hilary can be elected this go-round, and more importantly, if, this time, we can elect a Democratic/moderate Republican Congress. They're the ones who can stand up to the executive whoever he/she is.

[Edmundson]

Let's take a closer look at the Clinton years, since that must be a large part of Mrs. Clinton's "35 years of achievement" and experience. Weren't they eight wasted years? Sure, the budgets came into balance, but how much was that due to capital gains taxes from the bloated stock and real estate markets? And the Clinton's presided over the SUVing of the USA. How did the fleet mileage averages fare under the Clintons? And neither of them even used the bully pulpit to warn against the highway waste and increasing oil dependence.

[Tellmethetruth]

No - we want her for President - not closeted in the Senate as Ted Kennedy. Sorry, put Obama in the Senate and give him another 10 to 20 years to show himself as a stateman with some accomplishments to his name so that his fine words can be turned into action - then he will be credible if he ever runs for President. I hope he isn't afraid to roll up his sleeves and get some work done?????

In the meantime - let's break the barrior and do some real change and elect the first woman President in America!

[independentrepublicrat]

Great blog and I whole heartedly agree. However, I don't think the Clinton ego and ambition will settle for just the senate. She would more likely make a run for governor and try for the presidency again.

[DottieG]

Dreier's patronizing dismissal of Hillary Clinton reminds me of Pooh-Bah in "The Mikado"--"go away, little girls, there's dears." It was even more irritating than his misleading description of Ted Kennedy's 1980 presidential campaign. (And by the way, although I don't like to nitpick, Ted didn't assume the Kennedy "mantel"--that's what sits on top of a fireplace. The word is "mantle," and nobody should trust Spellcheck.)

I ran the labor desk for Senator Kennedy's winning 1980 presidential primary campaign in NJ, and let me assure you that Senator Kennedy had plenty of "fire in the belly." To describe his campaign as Dreier does, even though he won nearly 1/3 of the primaries, is simply misreading what happened. I'm really surprised that Dreier seems to have forgotten Chappaquiddick--that showed up as an issue everywhere, even in NJ.

In Obama, we have a young and charismatic--although inexperienced--Senator in the middle of his first term. I have no doubt that with the right kind of effort and accomplishment he will make a very effective Senator and be ready to be president some day in the not-too-distant future, and I look forward to helping to make that happen. But what this country needs this year is someone who understands the way things work and therefore can get things done. It's not enough to say we need "change"--the issue is what kind of changes we need and how we're going to get there. Jimmy Carter ran against Washington in 1976 and the result was minimal accomplishment and a subsequent loss. We don't need a repeat of that scenario.

[jwod]

It could have been entitled "How I can damn her by faint praise" without mentioning her opponents.

[narathan]

Mr LewisWalsh, I don't know much about your country beyond what I read - do remember that in third world countries we are fed on criticism of the United States and respect for your nation is diminished by the way you attack your leaders. You are not governed by dictators, and American citizens hold more power than citizens of other countries. How come then that you lay the blame for your troubles on "people such as HRC and the rest of the bribed permanent political class"?

[mtrue]

While Hillary has done a good job as senator and was the first lady does not qualify her for president. Sorry but Bad Bill's behavior has a lasting impression. The thought of choosing his return to the WH, when there are younger, talented change agents like Edwards and Obama seems ludicrous at best. If the Dems nominate her it is at their own peril.

[splashy]

Sounds like you want her to quit running for prez and go back to settling for a lesser office.

Personally, I'm thinking she should go for whatever she can. Why NOT be ambitious, all the MEN are.

[HartlessBeest]

My answer to MrLiberal53:
If you claim to be a staunch supporter of Hillary, you should at least avoid making lame excuses for her. You stated that she voted to authorize a more vigorous diplomacy to prevent possible war in Iraq. Well, it appears she wasn"t vigorous enough and chose to link arms with Cheney and Bush. For someone who declares she possesses the experience and qualifications to become the next president, it is clear she is lacking not only the insight, but the intelligence and the experience when having to make serious decisions. In this case, the wrong decision which ultimately resulted in the uneccessary bloodshed and the loss of thousands of lives and the many more thousands who will be maimed for life. THIS WAS THE IRAQ DEBACLE THAT COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED. Just being the ordinary Joe Blow on the street, how is it that I felt it would result in a catastrophic opening of a Pandora"s Box, and Hillary, with access to the numerous information sources, didn"t realise Bush was lying?

My post may suggest that I am "one of those Clinton haters". In fact, during Bill Clinton"s term in office, I was one of his avid supporters.

I believe Ron Paul, Kucinich, Edwards or Obama would be the best qualified to assume the role as the next president. Seven plus years under the Cheney/Bush administration have been a complete disaster with much of the support having come from spineless Democrats like Hillary Clinton who is just as much a WARMONGERING FANATIC as the two bungling TWITS, Cheney and Bush.

[anasazima]

The prospect of Hillary Clinton becoming a next generation Senatorial powerhouse is an appealing suggestion. However, although her legislative performance may be more robust than that of Barak Obama, it is paltry compared to Kennedy or a truly committed progressive Senator like Chris Dodd. And she is much nearer to their age than to the ages they were when they entered the Senate.

She has some of the requirements. She is really smart and she works really hard, However, to match the current Senatorial giants she will have to show skills not yet in evidence, such as willingness to share credit, willing to listen thoughtfully and respectfully to others, and patience. Her record does not show the willingness or personality to stick to the long haul and build a powerbase in the Byzantine complexity of the Senate.

[Abagail8]

Mr Drier should read the bio of Obama that is posted on this very same blog. His entrance to and advancement in the field of politics were everymuch as presidency guided as Clinton. His compromises with his progressive stands explained away as "being practical" "seeing that that wasn't going to happen" while Clinton's interpreted as loss of progressive values. This double standard put on us is what, in my opinion gave her the win in New Hampshire. It does not do the democrats any good to put blinders on when looking at the Obama candidacy because the republicans surely won't

[stephan1947]

Mr Dreier raises some interesting, salient paradigms of American political machinations...and yet. Setting aside the enigmatic contradictions of Ted Kennedy, I fail to see what Mr Dreier is trying to say about Hillary Clinton: 1) that she has political ambitions? 2) that these ambitions, as a senator, include the Oval Office? 3) that she has an excellent record, as a senator, of thoughtful votes (like McCain, she votes what she thinks). One could go on. Mr Dreier seems upset (and a little petulant and patronizing) that Mrs Clinton ignores his sage advice. The Talmud teaches one that some things are true, even if they never happened; that some things are false, even if witnessed. Take a deep breath, Mr Dreier...your efforts are critical thinking are, at the moment, a calculated risk on your part at embarassment; do not use Wite-Out on your computer screen.
Stephan Pickering / Chofetz Chayim ben-Avraham

[jeannekhan]

Hillary has the brains, backbone and balls needed for the job of president. Her street savvy will serve us well. If I see one more come to jesus moment a la Obama I may gag. Of course, she ought win. She earned the post. I wrote Kerry a tsk, tsk and Edwards is our second choice, but we will all vote in my house for the Democratic designee and we all want Hillary. Enough with the bashing, get a grip, stop doing Rove's work for him, folks. The hate is so familiar and Hillary is not the enemy, Bush/Cheney cronies are. Competence matters.
My young friends are not swayed by sheep herders of any stripe. Hillary is our choice.
BTW this bit about Kennedy is excellent notwithstanding I'd have a different conclusion. Kennedy has been able and has delivered over time. Well done exposition!

[SilerMarriott]

Typical male commentary. Let the woman work & toil in the trenches while the men shine in the spot light and lead and get the glory.

I say BS. In a unintended way your piece outlined many of the accomplishments that make her qualified to be Prez.

Go Hillary