Who is the Best Democratic Civil Liberties Candidate for 2008?
Tuesday January 15, 2008
Civil Liberties Profiles: Hillary Clinton | John Edwards | Dennis Kucinich | Barack Obama
Little more than a week ago, the best civil liberties candidate of either party, on paper, was Bill Richardson--a candidate whose platform represented a near-perfect fusion of left-libertarian and right-libertarian positions (see "Bill Richardson: The Best Civil Liberties Candidate for 2008"). But he's dropped out of the Democratic race, which is now officially down to four contenders: Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, and Barack Obama.
If Hillary Clinton were male, her candidacy would represent a depressing reaffirmation of the old Clinton administration's priorities. As longtime readers of this site no doubt know, I'm no fan of those priorities (see "The Gloomy Legacy of the Clinton Administration"). What makes Hillary Clinton's candidacy interesting to me, other than the fact that she isn't George W. Bush, is her gender; having a female president could obviously have a tremendously positive effect on our culture. I would love to hear four years of "Madam President," of the "she" pronoun used to describe the leader of the free world. And she's not a terrible candidate, exactly, except to the extent that she tries to pretend that her husband's mistakes weren't really mistakes. When she was asked at the first Democratic debate about "don't ask, don't tell," for example, she simultaneously praised it as a good policy for a 1993 Democrat while condemning it as a homophobic policy for a 2007 Republican.
There is also a very real sense, in Hillary Clinton's rhetoric, of a contempt for activism. In defending her credentials as a Washington insider, to name one particularly distressing example, she downplayed the role of Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement while praising President Lyndon Johnson for not vetoing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the New York Times reports:
President Johnson actually did play a significant role in getting the bill through the House Judiciary Committee; so did committee chair Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-NY), whose role in the process was less visible but equally important. What was more important than the participation of President Johnson or Rep. Celler, however, was the civil rights movement leading up to 1963 which, through cultural change and incremental policy reform, made federal legislation of this nature viable. President Eisenhower never tried to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, true, but it would have died in Congress if he had. A great deal changed in America between 1960 and 1964. One wonders if Hillary Clinton would say that while Mohandas Gandhi and his millions of satyagraha followers were important to Indian independence, it was the British governor-general, Viscount Lord Louis Mountbatten, who granted India independence and thereby "actually got it accomplished." For that matter, an equally strong argument could be made that while General George Washington and the Continental army were influential in repelling British control over the North American colonies and establishing the United States, it was King George III who granted independence to the colonies and thereby "actually got it accomplished."
Hillary Clinton's dismissive attitude towards activism arguably makes sense as a political strategy when one looks at her background alongside that of her most viable opponent, Barack Obama. While Hillary Clinton has done substantial work as an activist--most notably with the Children's Defense Fund, itself an outgrowth of Dr. King's Poor People's Campaign--most of her career over the past 30 years has focused on the acquisition and preservation of political power. Compare this to Obama, who has dedicated most of his adult life to citizen activism and issue advocacy--as a community organizer, as a civil rights attorney, as author of a bestselling 1995 book (Dreams from My Father), as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. When he did win election to the Illinois State Senate in 1996, his primary reason for being there seemed to be civil rights activism; his legislation established a new program to monitor police racial profiling, and required that homicide interrogations be videotaped. He was also active in death penalty reform, and tax reforms that primarily centered on the needs of low-income residents.
But it was his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention that put him on the map as a future presidential candidate. Rather than using the speech as an opportunity to promote himself or specifically praise presidential nominee John Kerry, he delivered a speech that set out a clearer agenda for the Democratic Party than any candidate had in years, overshadowing a stirring but vastly inferior speech delivered by President Bill Clinton the next night. Obama emerged from the speech as the obvious presidential contender for 2008: A political outsider with an activist background who came into the party with an inspiring vision. When President Bill Clinton scoffed at Obama's approach to policy last week, referring to it as a "fairy tale," it only reaffirmed the message that has become so central to his wife's campaign: That it's better to be a political insider who lives by the system than a political outsider who doesn't.
Meanwhile, John Edwards is probably wishing that he had a resumé more like Barack Obama's and less like Hillary Clinton's. Like Obama, he's trying to mount a visionary campaign. Unlike Obama, his history is that of a wealthy trial lawyer who turned to politics and somehow ended up on the 2004 presidential ticket. His history on civil liberties isn't particularly weak, but it isn't exceptionally good, either. He had the misfortune to be a member of the Senate during President Bush's post-9/11 reforms, and was largely deferential to them. This isn't really a strike against Edwards specifically, because every Democratic senator not named Russ Feingold was equally deferential, but Edwards was so busy campaigning in 2004 that he didn't have time to vote on corrective legislation. The end result? An abysmal (for a Democrat) 50% rating from the ACLU. Edwards isn't a terrible candidate by any means, but the only thing that makes him stand out as a candidate--his populist rhetoric, with its stiff condemnation of wealth consolidation and multinational corporations--isn't especially encouraging, from a civil liberties perspective. He has become a more compelling candidate, I think, than John Kerry was in 2004--but this isn't 2004.
Then there's Dennis Kucinich, who has no realistic chance of winning the nomination but presents a progressive view of American politics that constitutes a real, meaningful alternative. I'm stunned, at times, that Kucinich does not have his own version of the Ron Paul movement. Other than Kucinich, has any other candidate openly supported same-sex marriage? Has any other candidate openly called for a U.S. Department of Peace? Not all of Kucinich's ideas are workable--and he's a through-and-through liberal, not a left-libertarian--but most of them bear serious thought. Nobody can accuse Kucinich of being unprincipled.
So who should you support? Well, that depends on your priorities. None of the four remaining Democratic candidates are particularly terrible unless your main issue of interest is the Second Amendment, in which case you're looking at four candidates with F ratings from the NRA. (This is where Bill Richardson, with his A+ rating, would have really stood out.) On the other issues, Obama tends to be the most consistent supporter of sound civil liberties policy:
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If Hillary Clinton were male, her candidacy would represent a depressing reaffirmation of the old Clinton administration's priorities. As longtime readers of this site no doubt know, I'm no fan of those priorities (see "The Gloomy Legacy of the Clinton Administration"). What makes Hillary Clinton's candidacy interesting to me, other than the fact that she isn't George W. Bush, is her gender; having a female president could obviously have a tremendously positive effect on our culture. I would love to hear four years of "Madam President," of the "she" pronoun used to describe the leader of the free world. And she's not a terrible candidate, exactly, except to the extent that she tries to pretend that her husband's mistakes weren't really mistakes. When she was asked at the first Democratic debate about "don't ask, don't tell," for example, she simultaneously praised it as a good policy for a 1993 Democrat while condemning it as a homophobic policy for a 2007 Republican.
There is also a very real sense, in Hillary Clinton's rhetoric, of a contempt for activism. In defending her credentials as a Washington insider, to name one particularly distressing example, she downplayed the role of Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement while praising President Lyndon Johnson for not vetoing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the New York Times reports:
“I would point to the fact that that Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done,” she said. “That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it and actually got it accomplished.”What is significant in Clinton's view of the civil rights movement, in other words, is not that activists changed U.S. culture to make the Civil Rights Act possible but rather that the views of the president changed. President Eisenhower "had not even tried" to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, President Kennedy's approach to it was "hopeful" but unproductive, but President Johnson "said we are going to do it and actually got it accomplished."
President Johnson actually did play a significant role in getting the bill through the House Judiciary Committee; so did committee chair Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-NY), whose role in the process was less visible but equally important. What was more important than the participation of President Johnson or Rep. Celler, however, was the civil rights movement leading up to 1963 which, through cultural change and incremental policy reform, made federal legislation of this nature viable. President Eisenhower never tried to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, true, but it would have died in Congress if he had. A great deal changed in America between 1960 and 1964. One wonders if Hillary Clinton would say that while Mohandas Gandhi and his millions of satyagraha followers were important to Indian independence, it was the British governor-general, Viscount Lord Louis Mountbatten, who granted India independence and thereby "actually got it accomplished." For that matter, an equally strong argument could be made that while General George Washington and the Continental army were influential in repelling British control over the North American colonies and establishing the United States, it was King George III who granted independence to the colonies and thereby "actually got it accomplished."
Hillary Clinton's dismissive attitude towards activism arguably makes sense as a political strategy when one looks at her background alongside that of her most viable opponent, Barack Obama. While Hillary Clinton has done substantial work as an activist--most notably with the Children's Defense Fund, itself an outgrowth of Dr. King's Poor People's Campaign--most of her career over the past 30 years has focused on the acquisition and preservation of political power. Compare this to Obama, who has dedicated most of his adult life to citizen activism and issue advocacy--as a community organizer, as a civil rights attorney, as author of a bestselling 1995 book (Dreams from My Father), as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. When he did win election to the Illinois State Senate in 1996, his primary reason for being there seemed to be civil rights activism; his legislation established a new program to monitor police racial profiling, and required that homicide interrogations be videotaped. He was also active in death penalty reform, and tax reforms that primarily centered on the needs of low-income residents.
But it was his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention that put him on the map as a future presidential candidate. Rather than using the speech as an opportunity to promote himself or specifically praise presidential nominee John Kerry, he delivered a speech that set out a clearer agenda for the Democratic Party than any candidate had in years, overshadowing a stirring but vastly inferior speech delivered by President Bill Clinton the next night. Obama emerged from the speech as the obvious presidential contender for 2008: A political outsider with an activist background who came into the party with an inspiring vision. When President Bill Clinton scoffed at Obama's approach to policy last week, referring to it as a "fairy tale," it only reaffirmed the message that has become so central to his wife's campaign: That it's better to be a political insider who lives by the system than a political outsider who doesn't.
Meanwhile, John Edwards is probably wishing that he had a resumé more like Barack Obama's and less like Hillary Clinton's. Like Obama, he's trying to mount a visionary campaign. Unlike Obama, his history is that of a wealthy trial lawyer who turned to politics and somehow ended up on the 2004 presidential ticket. His history on civil liberties isn't particularly weak, but it isn't exceptionally good, either. He had the misfortune to be a member of the Senate during President Bush's post-9/11 reforms, and was largely deferential to them. This isn't really a strike against Edwards specifically, because every Democratic senator not named Russ Feingold was equally deferential, but Edwards was so busy campaigning in 2004 that he didn't have time to vote on corrective legislation. The end result? An abysmal (for a Democrat) 50% rating from the ACLU. Edwards isn't a terrible candidate by any means, but the only thing that makes him stand out as a candidate--his populist rhetoric, with its stiff condemnation of wealth consolidation and multinational corporations--isn't especially encouraging, from a civil liberties perspective. He has become a more compelling candidate, I think, than John Kerry was in 2004--but this isn't 2004.
Then there's Dennis Kucinich, who has no realistic chance of winning the nomination but presents a progressive view of American politics that constitutes a real, meaningful alternative. I'm stunned, at times, that Kucinich does not have his own version of the Ron Paul movement. Other than Kucinich, has any other candidate openly supported same-sex marriage? Has any other candidate openly called for a U.S. Department of Peace? Not all of Kucinich's ideas are workable--and he's a through-and-through liberal, not a left-libertarian--but most of them bear serious thought. Nobody can accuse Kucinich of being unprincipled.
So who should you support? Well, that depends on your priorities. None of the four remaining Democratic candidates are particularly terrible unless your main issue of interest is the Second Amendment, in which case you're looking at four candidates with F ratings from the NRA. (This is where Bill Richardson, with his A+ rating, would have really stood out.) On the other issues, Obama tends to be the most consistent supporter of sound civil liberties policy:
- On the First Amendment, all of the candidates support potentially restrictive campaign finance reform policies but Clinton and Kucinich also claim the dubious honor of having supported proposed bans on flag desecration (Clinton in the form of an ordinary law that would have been overturned by federal courts, Kucinich in the form of a constitutional amendment).
- On post-9/11 issues, Kucinich stands out, Obama looks strong (primarily because he wasn't anywhere near the Senate when Bush's post-9/11 reforms were passed), and Clinton and Edwards both look somewhat weak (as they both voted for some of the same bills that they would later criticize).
- On lesbian and gay rights, Kucinich supports same-sex marriage while the other three candidates support civil unions. All four candidates support the full range of other LGBT rights policies: an end to "don't ask, don't tell," approval of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), and the passage of new hate crimes legislation.
- All four candidates are strong on civil rights policy, though Obama has the best record of success.
- On abortion and reproductive rights, all four of the candidates are pro-choice but have complicated records. Clinton has supported parental notification laws; Edwards ran for the Senate as a moderate on abortion in 1998, pledging to support a live intact D&X ban that he would later vote against; Kucinich once identified as pro-life, and supported an abortion ban until 2002; Obama used to vote "present," instead of yea or nay, on some abortion laws that were before him when he was a member of the Illinois State Senate.
- On drug policy, Kucinich has an edge in that he's the only candidate who supports marijuana legalization. Clinton, Edwards, and Obama all support medical marijuana and reduced sentences.
- On criminal justice, Obama has the strongest record while Kucinich is the only one of the four committed to banning the death penalty. All of the candidates can boast significant reforms: Clinton and Edwards were among the co-sponsors of the 2003 Innocence Protection Act, which called for DNA testing in death penalty cases; Obama personally wrote and passed significant criminal justice reforms in the Illinois State Senate; Kucinich has been a consistent supporter of criminal justice reform in the U.S. House.
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Comments
Who is the Best democratic Civil Liberties Candidate for 2008?
Answer: Ron Paul
You should take a look at a superior analysis of the King-Johnson partnership at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/14/AR2008011402079.html??hpid=opinionsbox1 and then revise this post.
I suspect you may overstate Obama’s career as a community activist. He was a community organizer himself for only part of the five years between graduating from Columbia and entering Harvard Law School. His first job was with a publishing/consulting firm. Similarly, you minimize Clinton’s activist credentials, including leaving out her influential book, “It Takes a Village” (her civil rights focus was children and women.)He did direct a voter registration drive after law school, but quickly joined a Chicago law firm where he represented community organizers, discrimination claims and voting rights, among others. Clinton, focusing on children’s rights, worked on cases of child abuse and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free advice to the poor at while attending law school. After Clinton graduated from law school she studied children and medicine, write scholarly papers about children’s rights, and served as staff attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund and consultant to the Carnegie Council on Children. She then served as a member of the Nixon impeachment inquiry staff.
Obama was a lecturer of constitutional law from 1993-2004. Clinton moved to Arkansas in 1974 and joined the faculty of the University of Arkansas law school. All this before she married.
Obama went into politics just several years after graduating from law school, and he’s been there ever since. Yes, he sponsored or supported civil rights-related legislation. He also failed to support much of the same or fight against civil rights encroachments by voting present instead of yes or no.
Clinton followed her husband to Little Rock in 1976 and joined the Rose Law Firm, but continued working pro bono in child advocacy, co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, and served on the Legal Services Corporation board of directors. All this before her husband was elected Governor. She continued to advocate for the rights of children and women throughout her years as first lady of Arkansas and the U.S.
I think Clinton’s 7 years and Obama’s 3 years in the U.S. Senate, coming as they do in the post 9-11 environment, are arguably mixed on civil rights.
But as far as who’s the activist? Come on!
More pro-Obamamania based on thin policy details, three years of Senate voting, and talented rhetoric. To suggestS that Obama is stronger than Clinton regarding civil liberties is ridiculous.
Flabbergasted: I mentioned Clinton’s position as staff attorney of the Children’s Defense Fund, despite the fact that she served in this capacity only briefly and more than 30 years ago. Her time as a member of the Legal Services Administration board began 30 years ago on the button–in 1978–and lasted three years. I have never been clear on how much pro bono child advocacy work Clinton actually did at the Rose Law Firm. With respect to Obama, I think you should give his resumé a second look; despite early stints in other professions prior to law school, most of Obama’s private-sector career has been in civil rights advocacy and community organizing. He was a full-time civil rights attorney at Miner, Barnhill & Galland for four years, for example, in addition to his work as director of Chicago’s Developing Communities Project. If you look at what Obama did in his thirties versus what Hillary Clinton did in her thirties, then yes, they look like two impressive young activists. But if you look at what they’ve done in recent decades, I maintain that Hillary Clinton’s work has been almost exclusively political. As far as voting “present” is concerned: He did so on some of the more controversial abortion-related issues, such as live intact D&X and parental notification laws. John Edwards ran in 1998 on a platform of banning live intact D&X (though he would later vote against the ban), and Hillary Clinton supported parental notification laws prior to, and perhaps including part of, her Senate career.
Stephanie: Folks can legitimately disagree with my position that Obama has a stronger civil liberties resumé than Hillary Clinton, but there’s a lot more to Barack Obama than “thin policy details, three years of Senate voting, and talented rhetoric.” Given that Hillary Clinton could very well end up choosing Barack Obama as her running mate if she wins the nomination, I think her supporters would be wise to look at where his support really comes from, and what it represents. She will not be able to win the general election unless she is able to attract a comparable level of enthusiastic support from young and black voters.
Should banners symbolize banning everything? Let’s hope the fabric of democracy is stronger than a piece of cloth.