Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I have spent a not inconsiderable hunk of my time on a self-appointed mission to scold the ever more obviously benighted creatures of light over at Doc Thoma's comment cages.

Recently one of that site's leading statesmen pasted up this thoughtful reply to a footloose series of run-and-gun jobs by yours truly on... the Bill Clinton legacy. I thought you all might get a bit of a laff over it:

Get a grip, Paine.

Clinton was, among other things, an earnest policy wonk. There's a lot to be said for technocratic competence.

It doesn't mean that Clinton was, ever, anywhere near my heart's desire, in policy preference terms. My nostalgia for Clinton is not based on forgetting that I thought him too conservative at the time. My nostalgia is for a time, when leading politicians still thought policy mattered, that the consequences of policy mattered.

Republicans, our feckless Media, and dishwater Dems have... dumb(ed) our politics down to the point, where we don't even realize that consequences are not being considered.

... Few uses of the past are ever entirely honest -- every one is highly selective, by necessity as well as convenience.

Clinton actually did constrain the growth in Defense spending, and realized something of a peace dividend. Clinton actually did shift the tax burden upscale a bit -- not much, but some. Clinton actually did reduce an irresponsible budget deficit.

I don't want to get bogged down in rehearsing whether he should have tried to stop the conservative stampede instead of just turning it a few, ultimately inconsequential degrees. (That's what I thought at the time; now, that doesn't matter to me.) Probably he couldn't have, and probably he had no desire to do anymore than he did -- again, irrelevant to my concerns now.

It disturbs me that there is now so little reasoning about policy consequences in our politics and political discourse.

... out of touch with basic principles of right reason about policy. We fall very fast into the ditch of counterfactuals. We're praising the Great Man for an admirable performance one moment, and claiming he had no choice in the next, without even noticing that, unless he had choices, he cannot be credited with performing well, and, if he did have choices, and those choices had consequences, we might want to examine those choice and their consequences -- assuming, of course, that the Great Man decides to release the relevant information before 2018.

For me, touching Clinton is all about remembering a time, when we were not all completely insane.

Someone could weigh military and political interventions in a chaotic foreign country, with some kind of actual strategic purpose, a sense of proportion, and with a concern for practical questions, like minimizing the number of U.S. soldiers killed, as well as a concern with consequences in a complex situation.

I think about the care, and reason and anxiety that went into the intervention in Kosovo, and I compare it to Obama and Afganistan or Bush in Iraq and I just despair. The most basic markers of rational policy-making -- ex: proportion -- are gone, completely absent.

I am not interested in rehearsing arguments about whether he intervened too late to save thousands, or whether the bombing of Belgrade was humane, etc. There were many things I didn't like about the policy, in detail, at the time. I don't necessarily mean to endorse it, now. But, costs and consequences and national strategic objectives were actually being considered, weighed, resolved where in conflict, means appropriate to ends, sought, etc.

Nothing like that is apparent in discussion of the continuing war in Afganistan. We haven't advanced beyond the point at which Bush was declaring that our objective in Iraq was success.

Clinton was too DLC for my tastes, to be sure. But, that's not the point.