An irony of Hillary's assassination gaffe is that she was at her very
best (notwithstanding that on the tape she looks ready to drop) throughout
the rest of a very substantive, wide-ranging discussion with the Argus
Leader. From Native American policy to the varieties of potential ethanol
sources to western water policy, she was Clintonian in her mastery of policy
detail. You can understand why she thinks she's 'ready' to be President. If
it weren't for her long sequence of duplicitous, predatory, Rovian tactics
and comments, I would agree.

In fact the interview contained a
Clintonian answer to Obama's metapolitics - his pitch that we've got to
change the way our political system functions before we can enact good
policy. Obama's argument is that the U.S. government can't put the common
good first as long as lobbyists control legislation, and that we can't have
serious policy debates until we break through the Rovian politics of personal
destruction and distorting attacks. In this debate, Hillary said that we
can't engage in serious long-range planning and policy-making until we change
the mindset bequeathed
us by Ronald Reagan -- that government can't solve
anything, that the business of government is to shrink and undermine
itself.

The two diagnoses are related. The anti-government stance goes
with a messianic faith in the marketplace, a belief that business unleashed
and unregulated will create the wealth that government only inhibits.
Those holding that belief system naturally enough opened the lobbying
floodgates.
Not that there wasn't plenty of corruption and interest-driven
legislation in the long era of Democratic control of Congress -- but it
metastasized with the advent of the Gingrich-Delay crowd and their K Street
Project, and it took over the executive branch in the Bush era. So Obama and
Clinton are
both right. The antigov mindset created a system in which
legislation is for sale and political 'debate' becomes a cover for positions
essentially dictated by lobbyists.

Robert Reich, in Supercapitalism,
suggests that it's the hyper-competition of global capitalism that created
the pressures that brought this system into being. Reaganite antigovernment
ideology, from that point of view, is
more result than cause. Reich has few
answers as to how citizens and politicians can take the government back.
Hillary's answer is reverse engineering: get a mandate for the right
policies, and the attitude toward government will change. Obama's approach is
a frontal assault: remain
personally free from lobbyist money, get a mandate
to write legislation to reign in lobbyist influence, change political
discourse by personal example.

Will either (or any of their successors) get
anywhere? It may seem naive to say yes. But there have been periods, as both
like to say, in which the U.S. government has risen to enormous challenges
and successfully engaged in
long-range planning. Democracy's saving grace, as
long as there's a critical mass of power remaining with voters to throw one
crowd out and bring new people in, is self-correction. We're in the midst of
an attempted course
correction. We'd better get there.

Cross-posted at xpostfactoid.