Yes, using the “L” Word as an epithet is back in style, and not only by those you would expect to use it. The Washington Post reports:
But as Obama heads into the final presidential primaries, Sen. John McCain and other Republicans have already started to brand him a standard-order left-winger, “a down-the-line liberal,” as McCain strategist Charles R. Black Jr. put it, in a long line of Democratic White House hopefuls.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign has also started slapping the L-word on Obama, warning that his appeal among moderate voters will diminish as they become more aware of liberal positions he took in the past, such as calling for single-payer health care and an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba. “The evidence is that the more [voters] have been learning about him, the more his coalition has been shrinking,” Clinton strategist Mark Penn said.
I would expect that tired old attack from McCain’s camp, but from Hillary? From a fellow liberal Democrat?
Yes, her campaign used it in the same way that Republicans have been using it since back during the Bush Sr. campaign when Dukakis was branded by The Right as a “Liberal.” They used the label as an insult, and now the Clinton campaign is doing the same thing against another Democrat.
The attack is both unconscionable and ridiculous. Clinton attacks Obama from the Left for not being as liberal as she is on health care and then, when things get tough, she does the GOP’s dirty work for them and attacks him from the Right for running on a liberal platform.
Dukakis didn’t respond to the “L” Word attack very well, and his weak response, among other things, cost him the election.
Obama has responded not by embracing the term, like Dukakis should have done. He could have said what Krugman says in his latest book:
I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.
Instead Obama says the labels “Liberal” and “Conservative” have lost their meaning and are outdated, and he has a point. The traditional meanings of the words have been turned upside down. Again, quoting Krugman:
One of the seeming paradoxes of America in the early twenty-first century is that those of us who call ourselves liberal are, in an important sense, conservative, while those who call themselves conservative are for the most part deeply radical. Liberals want to restore the middle-class society I grew up in; those who call themselves conservative want to take us back to the Gilded Age, undoing a century of history. Liberals defend long-standing institutions like Social Security and Medicare; those who call themselves conservative want to privatize or undermine those institutions. Liberals want to honor our democratic principles and the rule of law; those who call themselves conservative want the president to have dictatorial powers and have applauded the Bush administration as it imprisons people without charges and subjects them to torture.
Clinton’s labeling of Obama as “liberal” today makes her look like a bratty kid in a playground spat. It’s almost as if she was hoping to catch him off guard and make him look ridiculous by getting him to respond with the equivalent of, “I know you are but what am I?” But it is she who looks ridiculous.
This episode of the way-too-long campaign has lowered my opinion of her to a level where I would find it difficult to actively support her should she somehow win the nomination. Like I said before, it’s unconscionable and, in the end, it should remove any chance of her winning the nomination.
1 Response to “The “L” Word”