Hillary’s Real Spitzer Problem

(reposted from 3/12/2008)


Although his resignation should quickly remove the story from the news cycle, Hillary Clinton can’t be thrilled that her message (however uninspiring) has been drowned out for the past few days by news with echoes of her husband’s very public dalliances, or that she appears to have lost another precious superdelegate in the worst possible way. But that’s not the most serious damage that Eliot Spitzer’s spectacular fall from grace could portend for her chances to clinch the Democratic nomination.

The message that Hillary and her surrogates have hammered home over the past several weeks is that she is better qualified to “get things done” in Washington – that her opponent may give a pretty speech, but his commitment to bipartisanship will hamper, not advance, the agenda that both candidates essentially agree on. Her toughness on the campaign trail, aside from being a desperate, kitchen sink strategy, also seems designed to show that she’s a fighter. When she gets to the White House, she’ll ram that agenda through against any opposition from Congress or the states. Steamroll it, perhaps.

We’re getting a glimpse this week of the downside of the warrior approach to politics. Eliot Spitzer rolled into Albany promising to be a [blanking] steamroller for change. He pushed his agenda, not through compromise and bipartisanship, but by taking on Republican leaders and even members of his own party in the legislature. The effort clearly did not win him many friends, and once he found himself in trouble, nobody was willing to stand up for him. The Republicans immediately raised the prospect of impeachment if he did not resign, and Democrats (who overwhelmingly control the chamber that would have to refer the impeachment charges for trial) privately signaled that they could not be counted on to defend him. Steamrolling has a short-term payoff, but in the long run, it doesn’t pave bridges; it destroys them.

Once the next President’s honeymoon is over (and the length of that honeymoon will be inversely proportional to the amount of ill will that he or she has generated on the road to office), he or she will inevitably face a crisis moment. It may not necessarily be of his or her own making (although with two Clintons in the White House, I have my doubts about that.) But there will be a time when political survival, and the survival of the President’s agenda, will depend on how many bridges have been built, as opposed to steamrolled. If we are looking for change in Washington, and change that brings results, perhaps a bridge builder is a better person for the job than a steamroller.