The Coronation of Hilary Clinton

Portrait by John Springs 

For the staffers who have been frantically working on the worst kept secret in Washington, the months of working out of coffee shops and crashing on relatives' couches in and around New York are as of this Sunday over.  After carefully crafting the framework of the formal campaign machine for the better part of four months, Hilary Clinton finally announced her candidacy for president in 2016 last Sunday.  Being the only big ticket candidate on the Democrats' radar for the better part of two years, her announcement came as a surprise to nobody.  And yet while several analysts have warned of the dangers of inevitability, as more of Clinton's campaign team and network of advisors are revealed it increasingly looks like the Democratic Party establishment has not only accepted Clinton but embraced her.

In the months leading up to the announcement it was interesting to note that many of the names being floated for top jobs on the campaign were veterans of the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns as well as recent departures from the White House.  John Podesta, who has been tapped to serve as campaign chairman was until recently a key advisor to the Obama Administration and served on the President's transition team in 2008.  Furthermore, some of the players who were instrumental in implementing Obama's youth targeted and data driven "get out the vote" initiative back in 2008 have resurfaced here in similar roles.  Obama's 2008 and 2012 digital strategists Teddy Goff and Andrew Bleeker are expected to be advising the Clinton campaign on its own plans for utilizing the Internet.  This is all in marked contrast with this point in the 2008 election cycle, where establishment Democrats were visibly split into several camps, with John Edwards, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and even Joe Biden also being posited as viable candidates early on.  Compare that to now where nine months out from Iowa, Clinton has successfully monopolized the support of beltway Democrats.  And unlike the time when establishment Republicans faced open rebellion from their party's Tea Party elements in 2012, the anticipated progressive rebuke of Clinton's "establishment" credentials has so far failed to materialize.

Having gained the implicit approval of liberal champion and congresswoman Elizabeth Warren, Hilary Clinton has likely removed the final potential roadblock to the 2016 Democratic nomination.  The two other frequently mentioned candidates, former congressman Jim Webb and former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, simply do not pose the same threat to Clinton that Warren and the progressive wing of the party do.  While it is easy to understand why Webb, a gun-loving former Reagan administration official, has limited appeal, O'Malley is a more interesting case.  He served as Mayor of Baltimore for eight years, and another eight as governor.  In 2011 he was elected Chair of the Democratic Governors Association, which he served as for two years.  Articulate, intelligent and well liked, in 2005 Business Week called him one of the Democratic Party's "rising stars", alongside Obama and current Chicago mayor Rahm Emanual.  But while Obama, then a freshman congressman, was able to launch himself onto the national stage, why have O'Malley's national ambitions largely stalled?

A fact that's largely been overlooked regarding Obama's rapid rise to prominence since first being elected to Congress in 2005 is the significant establishment backing that was required to launch his brand nationwide.  His personal story is compelling yes, but the central role of that story in his initial presidential campaign was the careful result of a DNC effort to find a message that would resonate with key swathes of the electorate.  Obama's story, that of a young, charismatic, mixed-race, Harvard Law educated freshman congressman who had spent years organizing at a grassroots level in Chicago was, in the DNC's estimation, fresh enough to mask the centre-left policy positions he shared with most mainstream Democrats.  That many of the voters targeted by Obama (students and college educated women, both of which are overwhelmingly liberal) found him "not liberal enough" just months into his administration only confirmed it.  "Change" was an intoxicating slogan, projecting the image of a political outsider as fed up with Washington as the average voter.  And yet, Obama was still at the core an establishment candidate who received backing from some of the Democrats' wealthiest donors.  Normally, the monolith that was Obama's donor base in 2008 and 2012 would be dispersed amongst several viable candidates, but instead it seems that many prominent Obama financiers threw their support behind a Clinton campaign over a year ago.

 O'Malley has stated that he is running for president, and judging from his record as a mayor and governor it is not unreasonable to think he'd be a good one.  But running a presidential campaign today means ad buys, PACs, data and staff, all of which require a fairly extensive donor network.  Having locked up vast swathes of the Democrats' donors roughly a year before the first primaries means that, barring a surprise Warren entry, Hilary Clinton has effectively iced out competition from other mainstream Democrats.  While Hilary Clinton will go to great lengths to stress that there is no "air of inevitability" this time around, party officials and donors' actions seem to suggest otherwise.  Sunday was a coronation, and make no mistake, Democrats firmly believe that Hilary Clinton is their ticket to the White House.  

Marie Le Pen and the NYT's Chickenhawk Stance on Free Reporting

Yesterday, readers of the op-ed section in the New York Times may have been surprised to see one of the published pieces was written entirely in french.  It was on that day that Marie Le Pen joined the ranks of countless other culturally significant (and make no mistake, controversial) figures to have been able to publish opinion pieces in such a storied paper.  While La Pen and her resurgent Front National party have been the beneficiaries of significant coverage in the EU, North American audiences for the most part are unaware of the stunning redressing of far right politics she may be on the cusp of accomplishing in France.

Established in 1972 as an amalgamation of various radical French nationalist groups, the Front National was, from its conception, a party predicated upon the principles of "pure" French identity and the rejection of non-European immigration.  While most of its policies actually aligned with those in the mainstream right, it was the party and its leader Jean-Marie Le Pen's (Marie Le Pen's father and the party's only other leader) virulent xenophobia, antisemitism and seeming fondness for dictatorial right wing regimes which drew the frequent condemnation of French politicians of all stripes.  In fact, his outrageous antics were enough that after the FN came in 2nd in the 2002 elections, the senior Le Pen essentially solidified his role as the figurehead of far right sentiments in the French political consciousness.  That a man who once referred to the occupation of France and subsequent deportation of Jews and other targeted groups during WWII as "not particularly inhumane, even if there were a few blunders, inevitable in a country of [220,000 square miles]" was very nearly elected to the Élysée Palace is a frightening reminder that a slumbering nationalist beast exists in French politics to this very day, threatening a groundswell nearly every election cycle.

If the elder Le Pen is considered the spiritual center and figurehead of the FN, he has largely conceded the brain to his daughter Marie.  Upon taking the reigns from her father in 2011, she embarked upon an ambitious redesign and airbrushing of the party's platform in the hopes on increasing its electoral chances, a gamble which so far seems to be working.  Riding a wave of Europskepticism among the EU's wealthier nations, the party has captured 23 seats in European Parliament, and has taken control of councils and mayoral offices in mainly industrial cities which have borne the brunt of the most recent economic crisis.  Even though her party only currently holds three seats in the National Assembly, many party faithful are confident Le Pen will indeed be President in 2017.  But no one has been fooled into thinking that the core message has changed; in the aftermath of the shootings in Paris two weeks ago Jean-Marie Le Pen told the Huffington Post "I am not Charlie Hebdo, I am Charlie Martel."  Martel of course, was a Frankish (de facto) king among whose many accomplishments was the successful repelling of Islamic invaders from North Africa.  Poor historical analogies aside, the racist and borderline fascist origins of the policies which continue to guide the Front National today were enough that Nigel Farage of UKIP, himself no stranger to accusations of racism, blasted Le Pen's party as "antisemetic" and "racist".

And so we arrive at Le Pen's editorial.  In it, she seems to imply that the government shied away from labelling the attack on Charlie Hebdo's offices an act of Islamist terror, a patently false accusation.  Both Le Pen and her party may seem repellent and their policies and rhetoric harmful to efforts to integrate Muslim migrants fully into French society, and yet publishing her piece was not where the Times stumbled.  While it is not surprising that the FN and other far right groups are seizing upon this opportunity to label the government as soft on Islamic terror, and laying responsibility for the attacks at the feet of Muslim immigration, it is surprising that the editorial staff at the New York Times felt that giving La Pen a soapbox with which to extol her agenda of Islamaphobia and xenophobia was of value as news, especially in light of another editorial decision at the paper to not publish the cover of Charlie Hebdo's first edition since the shooting.  In a blog post a week later, NYT Public Editor Margaret Sullivan wrote that in her opinion, the cartoon depicted on the cover, despite its potential to offend a minority of readers, was not gratuitously offensive nor was it devoid of news value.  And yet, it was shelved to avoid "offending Muslim sensibilities".

This isn't a question of journalists having the ability to publish whatever they wish, but rather one of them being restricted in their ability to best illustrate and convey stories they deem newsworthy.  For example, Executive Editorial Editor Dean Baquet's decision to not include the more graphic of the Mohammad cartoons because they were of little worth with regards to advancing understanding of the story at hand (The shooting at Charlie Hebdo's offices) was perfectly justified.  If asked to defend the publication of Marie Le Pen's editorial, the editors at the Times will no doubt point to the long history of people writing controversial and potentially inflammatory things in its op-ed pages over the years, and how ideas and speech, regardless of how morally reprehensible they may seem, should be publicly aired, lest they quietly fester on the fringes much like most of the radical policies the FN espouses; and they would be absolutely correct.  There is no doubt that op-eds critical of Marie Le Pen's views have been published, and will continue to be published.  Her policies will be subject to critical analysis and challenged based on their adherence to facts, versus distortion of them.   What the New York Times should apologize for however, is the double standard it adhered to when it decided that publishing an editorial possibly damaging to religious relations in France was alright, but that a story about a cartoon with the potential to inflame some readers could be neutered to appease that minority by removing an image of the cartoon itself.

No one should harbour any delusions that this cowardly attack in Paris two weeks ago was remotely justified, or that jihadis deserve to not feel insulted.  To suggest so would be to equate those who perpetrate such acts of terror with those who peacefully practise Islam, those who owe no more of a condemnation of terrorism than the rest of us.  The only ones who owe the people of France and generally anyone horrified by such acts anything are those who suggested that the perpetrators' actions were in any way justified.  It is Pope Francis, and those who marched in Tehran and Beirut under the banner "I am not Charlie" who owe a condemnation of radical Islam to us, and not to a rank political opportunist like Marie Le Pen and her ilk.