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Spare Us the Ideologues, Please

In today’s Washington Post, Dan Balz wrote about what some apparently perceive as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s inability to fashion for herself “a coherent governing philosophy.”

“She is viewed as a hawk on Iraq and national security, stamped as a big-government Democrat for her work on health care in the 1990s, and depicted as seeking the mdidle ground on abortion…,” Balz wrote. But “she has yet to wrap up her ideas in a kind of package like the ‘New Democrat’ philosophy her husband, former President Bill Clinton, used in his 1992 campaign or the ‘compassionate conservative’ label George W. Bush adopted in 2000….”

According to Balz, there’s consternation about this not only among the usual Hillary haters, but even among Democratic party faithful. I’m not sure these qualify as representative of most Democrats, but Balz cites “liberal columnist Molly Ivins [who] dismisses Clinton as the embodiment of ‘triangulation, calculation and equivocation.’ Markos Moulitsas, whose Daily Kos Web site often attacks the Democratic establishment, ridicules her as a leader who is ‘afraid to offend.” And the conservatives write her off (or rather try to paint her) as a liberal ideologue.

If Senator Clinton is impying that she’s no ideologue, then more power to her. George W. Bush has shown us how disastrous it is to govern purely by ideology rather than pragmatism. He has:

* passed several massive tax cuts, an old ideological chestnut, in spite of the fact that he could never really explain the reasons or benefits for doing so and at times when this government has needed more cash to fight wars, pay for disaster relief, support a Medicare prescription drug benefit and stave off fiscal implosion. For that we have record, debilitating budget deficits.
* launched a war on a country he and a lot of other ideologues wanted to invade long before they had the pretext to do so. For that we have destroyed thousands of lives and won more enemies than we had before the invasion of Iraq.
* proposed so-called private accounts within Social Security, an idea that languished in ultra-conservative think tanks for years and that would have exacerbated the long-term challenges of Social Security. Luckily, he could not explain it to the people, and he has backed off this ill-fated idea.
* undermined his own Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in Sub-Saharan Africa by imposing requirements to promote “abstinence and faithfulness” initiatives, which have taking focus and funding away from proven interventions. (For more on this, click here.)
* lost valuable time in the fight against global warming by insisting that we really won’t know if there’s such a thing as global warming until the ice caps are completely melted and that the only real solution to our addiction to oil is to pump more of it out of the ground, not encourage energy conservation, which is for woosies.

If a stubborn, narrowminded ideological approach to every public need is what some would like from our politicians, then deal me out. I don’t know yet if Hillary Clinton has everything it takes to be president (though I like her a lot), but if one of her qualities is that she’s not driven by predictable dogma that is unconscious of the current realities of the world, then I’m buying. I have to concede, though, that not being moored to a particularly clear ideology could mean she’ll float with the wind, which is no good. But I think what she’s saying is that she will not prejudge an issue before she has had to a chance to look at all sides. That’s good governing.

And maybe even good politics. I personally think that most Americans would prefer a more pragmatic approach to governing. Though I have no empirical evidence to support that claim, I just think that relatively few Americans think about the world ideologically. We are for the most part, I would say, a pragmatic people. For those who aren’t, the tenure of George W. Bush is all they need to swear off of pure ideology.