The Rise of Doughface-ism

» TNR: Double Negative (David Greenberg)

Captures my sentiments almost precisely ...

The issue of negative campaigning and its proper bounds is now dominating the Democratic campaign. In recent weeks, the neck-and-neck race has degenerated into a miasma of trivial flaps--the source of that photo of Barack Obama in Somali garb, the "gaffes" of Samantha Power and Geraldine Ferraro, and so on--only tenuously related to the question of whether Obama or Hillary Clinton would be a better president. Each side, angling for any edge, gins up pseudo-controversies. In response, each feigns indignation, claiming the other is hitting below the belt.

These skirmishes have yielded no discernible advantage. But the bickering has, troublingly, validated a piece of conventional wisdom among a liberal commentariat that was already tilting heavily toward Obama: that Clinton is "ruthless," "vicious," even "Nixonian"--an unscrupulous appendage of her husband's "machine" (a word seldom used about the far better oiled Obama apparatus). As Obama's guru David Axelrod would have it, "They are literally trying to do anything to win this nomination." You hear it said everywhere, from blogs to high-toned op-ed pages. But this virulent meme is untrue, and--quite apart from the current contest--anyone who cares about liberalism and its future should be worried by its spread.

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The most compelling reason to stop the demonization of Clinton is a philosophical one. For the claim that Clinton's attacks are somehow beyond the pale rests on and revives a distressing view of liberalism, politics, and power that, only recently, liberals seemed quite united in overcoming.

With its emphasis on fairness, openness, and playing by the rules, liberalism has always fostered an ambivalence about the exercise of power. A well-placed concern not to let ends justify means has often led to a misplaced sacrifice of ends to means. Fears of power's abuse have often constrained its use. In the 1950s, when Adlai Stevenson carried the Democrats' standard, party chairman Stephen Mitchell argued that liberals had to respond to the underhanded tactics of men like Nixon in kind. In the opinion journals, he was rebutted. If won on such terms, asked William Lee Miller in The Reporter, "then whose is the victory?" In contrast, Miller argued, "if we stick by what we believe, we may not win as often, but when we do we shall know what the victory means." That's how Stevenson ran--and lost. Since the 1980s, Democrats have explained away defeats by arguing that Republicans won only by playing dirty--a rationalization that is both inaccurate and self-deluding.

Yet, in contrast to this "doughface" liberalism, as Arthur Schlesinger famously termed it, another liberal tradition also exists. Under Franklin Roosevelt, wrote Schlesinger, "American liberalism ... had a positive and confident ring. It has stood for responsibility and for achievement." FDR and the New Deal's lieutenants respected fair play and fair procedures, but they put results first. They understood that politics is, inherently, a field of combat, not for the faint-hearted.