Thoughts on Hillary Clinton's Career

It may seem a perverse subject for meditation on inauguration day for Donald J. Trump, but I'd like to take a Big Picture look at the woman who conspicuously isn't the center of today's ceremonies, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Think back on 2007, the early jockeying on the Democratic side, before any actual primaries or even caucuses had been held. HRC at that time was using the phrase "help make history." Support for her was helping to make history. She wasn't using the phrase "glass ceiling" much in that cycle, but the appeal suggested by the phrase was the same.

This would have been a perfectly sensible appeal for her to make, if the chief intra-party opponent had turned out to be Christopher Dodd or Joseph Biden, just another WASPy white guy. It might have been somewhat less sensible if the intra-party opposition had coalesced around, say, Joseph Lieberman or Bernie Sanders. But we'll get back to that.

A less hypothetical point is this: the notion that voting for HRC in particular would "make history" in a demographic sense ceased to be very germane when the intra-party opposition coalesced around ... Barack Hussein Obama.

HRC understood this. But it required her to make a mid-campaign shift in emphasis. She not only dropped the demographic stuff, she started making the appeal to experience, to the steadiness of the hands one wants near the red phone. She ran ads about the call that could come at 3 AM. Presumably she had been there when important 3 AM calls arrived in the residential portion of the White House, and that would make her hands steadier. With these new guys from nowhere, you never know.

Note that this isn't just a different campaign theme from the one she started with. Its the opposite theme. The appeal to steady hands is always the appeal by the old crowd, to the one's who have been in power already. It is the appeal made for the perpetuation of a status quo by those for whom that status quo is a glass floor, not a ceiling.

HRC failed to secure the nomination that year. I think the reason may simply have been that the cognitive dissonance for this switch from one appeal to its opposite was too great for the party's base to absorb.

Flash forward: 2015-16. In the primary campaign this year, HRC makes little of the "woman card." She doesn't appeal to her demographic uniqueness until after she secures the Democratic nomination, and even then it was because Trump, calling such as yet unmade appeal the "woman card," forced her hand. She doesn't use it vis-à-vis Sanders at all, although of course there are others who do that for her.

At one debate, Sanders is asked how he would feel were he the one to prevent the first woman presidency in US history. If he had been Larry David (rather than simply someone who looks suspiciously like Larry David) he would have said, "so what would be the first Jew ... chopped liver?" But he didn't quite say that -- he gave a more muted form of that response.

Still, the demographic fact was not a big part of Clinton's repertoire. Perhaps she felt that she had been burned by it before, and this time she'd start and continue with the appeal to her steady hands. By this time, of course, he experience with ringing red phones was wider -- it wasn't that of a first spouse but that of a former Secretary of State. So she presumably thought this was a still stronger appeal against Sanders than it had been against Obama.

It was sufficient against Sanders, and she won the nomination. But ... his strength, despite the fact that he had been an utter unknown to most of the population of the US when the campaign began, may have indicated to cooler heads that the "steady hands" appeal of those standing on a glass floor had its limits in 2016.

The ending of my story you know. Perhaps none of it matters. An appeal coached this way versus one coached the other way. One might argue based on an old cyclical theory of American history that there was bound to be a rightward shove in this cycle, that the Republican nominee would inevitably win. Still, I am attracted to what seems to be an unusual thought: maybe Clinton's problem wasn't (1) that people didn't want to break that glass ceiling, still less (2) that people thought she was over relying on that "card," but (3) that having learned the wrong lesson the last time around, she delayed making that appeal too long, and was too timid and defensive about making it when she did.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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