Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> Balkinization

OR PHONE (866) 635-1838 for Bankruptcy Help, (866) 635-6190 for Divorce,
(866) 635-2689 for Personal Injury or (866) 635-9402 for Criminal Defense

Find a Local Lawyer

Bankruptcy (866) 635-1838
Divorce (866) 635-6190
Personal Injury (866) 635-2689
Criminal Defense (866) 635-9402

Legal Commentary

: Balkinization

A Clinton voter repents

By Jack M. Balkin

ADVERTISEMENTS

So I?ll admit it: I voted for Hillary Clinton in the Illinois Democratic primary, and now I?m sorry. I hadn?t anticipated the enormous sense of political liberation and exhilaration that an Obama presidency would create. Clinton wouldn?t and couldn?t have delivered that.

I tend to judge politicians the way I judge other hired help: can they do the work I?m paying them to do? There is, of course, a set of contestable political judgments in my view. I?m paying the government to deliver universal health care, ameliorate the maldistribution of wealth in the United States, provide safe workplaces, stop global warming, and deliver any number of other things that my conservative friends think ought not to be delivered. In the primaries, Obama and Clinton weren?t very far apart on any of those issues, and I never found a reason to care terribly which of them got the nomination. I was troubled by Obama?s lack of experience. Now it seems likely that whatever Clinton?s experience can offer the country will in fact be available to it in a slightly less exalted office.

The promise of Obama is nicely encapsulated in this prescient blog post, written last January for the Huffington Post by the 1960s radical leader Tom Hayden when he endorsed Obama. Hayden concludes:

?I have been devastated by too many tragedies and betrayals over the past 40 years to ever again deposit so much hope in any single individual, no matter how charismatic or brilliant. But today I see across the generational divide the spirit, excitement, energy and creativity of a new generation bidding to displace the old ways. Obama's moment is their moment, and I pray that they succeed without the sufferings and betrayals my generation went through. There really is no comparison between the Obama generation and those who would come to power with Hillary Clinton, and I suspect she knows it. The people she would take into her administration may have been reformers and idealists in their youth, but they seem to seek now a return to their establishment positions of power. They are the sorts of people young Hillary Clinton herself would have scorned at Wellesley. If history is any guide, the new "best and brightest" of the Obama generation will unleash a new cycle of activism, reform and fresh thinking before they follow pragmatism to its dead end.

?Many ordinary Americans will take a transformative step down the long road to the Rainbow Covenant if Obama wins. For at least a brief moment, people around the world -- from the shantytowns to the sweatshops, even to the restless rich of the Sixties generation -- will look up from the treadmills of their shrunken lives to the possibilities of what life still might be. Environmental justice and global economic hope would dawn as possibilities.

?Is Barack the one we have been waiting for? Or is it the other way around? Are we the people we have been waiting for? Barack Obama is giving voice and space to an awakening beyond his wildest expectations, a social force that may lead him far beyond his modest policy agenda. Such movements in the past led the Kennedys and Franklin Roosevelt to achievements they never contemplated. (As Gandhi once said of India's liberation movement, "There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.")?

Hayden?s judgment turns out to have been prescient. Obama will do the country good just by being in the White House.

He looks likely to be pretty good at delivering on those mundane policy details, too.

Full post as published by Balkinization on November 24, 2008 (boomark / email).