Clintonista urges Dems to use caution …

Posted by Joshua Holland at 2:18 PM on August 23, 2006.

Of all of Clinton's myriad advisors and former Secretaries of This and That running around telling progressives what they should be doing, my favorite is former Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

Over at TomPaine yesterday, he had a column urging democrats -- should they take the House this November -- to move with caution in dealing with our Imperial president and his enablers. He's half right:

[Dems will] be sorely tempted to showcase the Bush administration in all its lurid awfulness. Imagine an endless parade of witnesses offering shocking details of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, torture camps, payoffs to Halliburton, Defense Department usurpations, Iraq's descent into civil war, and other cover-ups, deceptions, data manipulations, suppressions of science, crass incompetencies, and outright corruption…

After all, didn't House Republicans during the Clinton years wreak all the damage they could even when there wasn't much to complain about? … Why shouldn't Henry Waxman… give as good as the Clinton White House got? Imagine how John Dingell, who will run the House Energy and Commerce Committee, could expose the intimacies between the Bushies and Big Oil; what John Conyers, in command of the House Judiciary Committee, could reveal about Bush's trouncing of Americans' civil liberties; or the job Barney Frank, at Financial Services, could do on the administration's nefarious links to Wall Street. Hell, why not try to impeach Bush?

Warning: Resist all such temptation.

You won't be credible. The public would see the investigations and hearings as partisan wrangling. They might even cause the public to question what it already knows, allowing Republicans to argue it was all conjured up by partisan zealots from the start.

You won't get any new information anyway. Your subpoena power would have no effect on this White House. You'd end up fighting in federal courts for the whole two years. Besides, there's enough dirt out there already to sink any administration…

Moreover, Bush is the wrong target. His popularity could hardly be lower than it is already, which means 2008 Republican candidates in all but the reddest of red states will distance themselves from this White House…

Finally, you and your colleagues have spent the last six years whining and complaining. That was understandable. There was ample reason, and you didn't have the power to do otherwise. But do that when you do have some power, and you'll confirm the Republican message that Democrats are pessimistic Eeyores, obsessed with what's wrong with America and clueless about what to do or how to fix it.

Here's a better way to go. Use the two years instead to lay the groundwork for a new Democratic agenda. Bring in expert witnesses. Put new ideas on the table. Frame the central issues boldly.

Setting aside Reich's faith that the current crop of Democrats are capable of laying out a bold agenda to deal with the country's many serious problems -- a belief that doesn't appear to be supported by any recent evidence that I can see -- there are several problems with his analysis.

He's right that appearing overzealous in going after the Bushies may incur a political cost that is too high, but he's wrong to suggest that the issues that a Democratic Congress might investigate are in any way equivalent to the Republicans' obsessive attacks on the Clinton Whitehouse.

There are serious charges against this Whitehouse -- charges that go way beyond lying us into a war -- that need to be addressed, and Reich is dangerously close to suggesting that issues like circumventing the 1978 FISA law or international and domestic bans on torture are a matter of ideological or partisan preference not fundamental questions about the rule of law or the separation of powers -- he's saying: "vote for us and we won't choose to spy on you." They have, indeed, become partisan fights, but they never should have been.

Reich might have urged Democrats to pick their fights carefully, and I would have agreed. But at the end of the day, either you're for accountability or you're not. Saying we should let bygones be bygones and look forward is taking a stand against holding officials to account for their actions. We're supposed to be a nation of laws, not men, right?

It's also wrong to argue that Congressional investigations would have little impact because "there's enough dirt out there already to sink any administration." Controlling the Congressional agenda is a way of influencing what is emphasized in our political discourse. Yes, the media has covered Democratic reports of corruption or lying to Congress, but it's done so on page A22. When John Conyers held hearings on the trumped up rationale for the Iraq war, he did so in a crappy, overcrowded hearing room given to him by the Republicans who controlled the House, and that earned him only a typically sneering Dana Milbank column in the Washington Post ("In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe"). Yeah, the issues raised there were covered, technically, but never became part of the mainstream national discussion.

There's a lot more I could say about the assumptions that support Reich's piece, but let me just add that he's presenting us with a false dichotomy. Yes, we need representatives who will offer a bold new agenda, but I don't see how you get there without shining a bright light on how we got where we are now in the first place. Reich is correct that Bush shouldn't be the primary target; the big bull's-eye should be on the conservative project itself, and that means laying bare its framework -- the money, the communications, the politicians … everything (including its Democratic allies).

Without that, Reich's "bold agenda" will be limiting to tinkering around the edges, which is what the Clintonistas always endorse -- probably because of their abiding belief that the Clinton years represented some kind of ideal period in American governance. Until they get that a "bold agenda" means just that, millions of progressives will continue to see the Dems as no more than a bandage, a way to stop the bleeding, and not credible agents of change.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.