Clinton underestimates Carter

The Clinton Global Initiative had their yearly convention last week, and right at the tail end of the convention was a conversation with Jimmy Carter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSdJ4gbc3oQ

Throughout the video you can see Clinton trying to pose very open-ended questions to Carter, seemingly expecting him to reflect back fluffy platitudes and inspirational quotes to help validate a narrative that government is ineffective at dealing with these issues: systemic poverty, social mobility, childhood education, and infrastructure in the third-world; that only the generosity of a handful of plutocrats and their pet projects can truly provide effective relief to millions of desperate people in our country and around the world. It seems Carter, however, had a different agenda. What unfolds is fascinating and helps highlight how much of a progressive warrior Jimmy Carter really is, as well as the nature of Clinton’s own political leanings.

Clinton begins the conversation with a rather explicit attempt to push his own narrative:

“… the American economy is different than it was when you served, different than it was when I served, the challenges — somewhat different. …A lot of it [the struggles of the average US citizen] is rooted in the fact that so many people are stuck — economically. If you were approaching this from a service point of view, as opposed to being in political office, do you have any ideas about what we can do about that?”

Carter responds, completely ignoring Clinton’s mark, with an anecdote about his time as president:

“…when I left office we had a program going on with relatively low tuition and good state support where every qualified person could go to college. I hope that we’ll see that come back again, I know there’s been talk about universal college…”

Whoah — someone is going off script. If this was the only reference to Sanders’ policy positions, positions that run contrary to Hillary Clinton’s, I would probably have let it go. Yet, almost immediately after tipping his hat toward Bernie’s tuition-free college policy, he then calls out problems with mass incarceration; which we now know were largely the result of the 1994 Crime Bill passed under President Clinton, along with Nixon’s War on Drugs.

Here, Carter asserts that we should decriminalize the use of marijuana and treat drug addiction as an illness rather than a crime. Another Bernie Sanders talking point, but something that the presumptive Democratic nominee has not advocated for:

“When I was governor we had a competition with other governors in the south, including Arkansas as a matter of fact, to minimize the number of people in prison. In 1976 when I became president, one out of a thousand Americans were in prison. Now, seven and a half times as many people are in prison as there were back then, and a lot of it is because of a incarceration of people for taking drugs.”

“…I believe we need to change our policy on drug care. When I was in office I made a public statement in 1979, I think it was in May, that called for the decriminalization of marijuana. …”

“We concentrated then on treatment of people that had drug addiction. That changed when I went out of office — as you probably know. …”

“Now there is an increasing number of people who want to change it back.”

Clinton attempts to quickly align on the general problem of mass incarceration and economic struggle, but then begins to home in on a common centrist Democrat ideology; the “ladder approach” to economic inequality. This is the idea that a person who is just entering the workforce, or someone who’s skill set doesn’t yield much on the job market, should not be given adequate wages or protections, but that they should be instead provided with opportunities to grow their job skills, and over time, build social mobility.

This is a politically convenient ideology. By presuming an idealized world of equal and available economic opportunity, we may excuse massive amounts of poverty and suffering by blaming those in peril for not working hard enough to reach the next rung of their ladder. In Clinton’s own words:

“…the government can do what it ought to do to change the laws, but I think it’s unrealistic given all these budget problems that governments have to think that we will adequately prepare them
[people returning to work after release from jail] …”

Next, Clinton brings up the fact that California has systematically removed gerrymandering by using an independent system for drawing congressional districts and changed its electoral process to use jungle voting. He claims that this has improved the quality of political debate, forcing candidates to focus on what is actionable, rather than dissolving into ideological arguments. Clinton uses this opportunity to counter Carter’s subtle shoutouts to Sanders with the combatting narrative illustrated in Hillary’s presidential campaign:

“…it works better because the candidates in more and more districts have to appeal to people across the board [following changes to how congressional districts are drawn].”

“It isn’t healthy to be an elected representative of the people and realize you can never be defeated again unless somebody gets to the right of you if you’re a Republican or to the left of you if you’re a Democrat.”

“…they [California politicians] talk more about the practicalities of implementing progressive reforms that — they feel safe to talk about [sic.] — that it may not be as easy as it sounds.”

Carter is unfazed. He strikes again, now eyeing the all-important policy of campaign finance reform:

“Another thing we can do, which I think would improve the situation [quality of representation] is to go back to presidential elections just using public funds for the general election. As you know, when I ran against Gerald Ford, the incumbent president for the general election, we raised zero money. …we just took just $1 per person check…”

“…you probably did the same thing, did you not?”

Once again, Carter brings up an important progressive policy, public funding of elections, that Hillary has not shown support for. Better yet, he’s able to reference its success in his own presidential campaign and throw some rather subtle shade at Bill Clinton, who most certainly did not fund his campaign purely through small donors, much less public funding.

You can see this has shaken Clinton a bit. He realizes that he must start delegitimizing some of these ideas:

“Now of course it would require, as you pointed out, a change of the Supreme Court decision [Citizen’s United]. Because you could say, ‘well you can’t have this public money unless you follow restraints, but that was the rule before, but so much money could be raised everybody just blew by it.”

This was a weak, incoherent rebuttal for such a desperately necessary policy change. Jimmy Carter fires back:

“I really like three words you just used. Change — supreme — court.”

Oh burn. Clinton needs to quickly recover from this. Clumsily, he attempts to change topic and scope simultaneously, expanding the conversation to other countries, with a less-than-subtle reference to Trump and right-wing nationalism:

“Let me ask you — something else that I think is important — help us understand, you’ve continued to travel the world, you’re in very close touch with all the things that are going on. People are worried about a lot of the harsh rhetoric and rather extremely divisive things that are being said in America, but the truth is that they’re being mirrored everywhere in the world.”

We’re starting to see lots and lots of exposition here, this is a common theme for both Bill and Hillary Clinton when they are uncomfortable discussing a topic from a certain angle. The desperation of Clinton to move Carter’s messaging is palpable. He even straight up tells him not to talk about the US:

“What’s your take on this? Why do you think it’s happening world-wide and what if anything can be done about it? And don’t say anything about America, just think about the rest of the world. This is going on everywhere.”

Clinton’s original question, as to why nationalist tensions are on the rise, has now become so broad he might as well have asked “what’s the meaning of life”. What’s left on Bernie’s platform for Carter to bring up? How is he going to tie this altogether?

“My greatest concern about the next century is the increasing division between rich people and poor people.”

“We’ve lost that sense that each generation will be better off.”

Income inequality. He might as well have just dropped the mic here, because less than thirty minutes in, Carter has argued for nearly every policy of Bernie Sanders’ campaign platform; drawing parallels to his own experiential evidence to prove each policy’s efficacy and using Clinton’s own talking points to frame their importance. I can’t imagine Clinton had any idea what was in store for him when he invited this 90 year old, do-gooder to come talk to him at the tail end of his conference.

Now Clinton has to start fighting back before this liberal gets too much control of the narrative. In an attempt to dismiss income inequality and unethical trade policy as the source of nationalist tensions, Clinton pulls out a couple token examples of egalitarian cultures to stitch together a narrative that countries with fairer economies are not only subject to similar movements, but actually more likely to produce nationalists:

“…by-in-large, the places that have more economic inequality and upward mobility have less tension.”

“For example, that Austrian election was very close between candidates who said ‘build walls’ and candidates who said ‘build bridges’ and they have, almost no inequality and a fair amount of upward mobility, but they still feel this identity crisis.”

Finally, the pivot is complete. The topic is finally about charity work, and this time Clinton has posed a somewhat interesting idea regarding governance of international non-state actors, or NGOs. But Clinton can’t help himself, after a bit of good alignment topics, he goes straight in for home plate with the essential centrist Democrat thesis of “the economy just can’t be egalitarian anymore because reasons”:

“How much do you think, people feeling that the government doesn’t treat them fairly in their incomes, can be tied to the weakening of the union movement in America, and how much do you think is the inevitable result of our moving away from manufacturing toward a more service-oriented economy?”

Carter is having none of it.

“Well I think the reason most Americans feel they’re not being treated fairly by the government, is because they’re not being treated fairly by their government.”

He continues:

“Since I left the Whitehouse, every administration after mine, except one — yours — has reduced taxes on the richest people and not taken care of the middle class, which is almost now eliminated.”

“Most of the breaks that come along are caused by the changes in congress, because the lobbyists, who are there putting constant pressure on congress members and giving them money to run for re-election work for the big corporations and so fourth.”

“It convinces the average person ‘I’m not getting my fair share’, and I think that’s accurate. So we need to change that, and I hope in the next administration we’ll see that change.”

Carter has now effectively called Hillary Clinton to action to fight against political corruption. It should be transparent to anyone watching, that any “hopes” Carter relays are rather obviously being directed at the likely First Man. Thus, this public conversation may be interpreted as an opportunity for Carter to apply pressure to change Hillary’s more conservative or neoliberal positions, through her husband.

Since Hillary is trying to build much of her political capital off of Obama’s presidency, Bill tries to defend some of the regressive taxation under Obama by blaming its original author, George W Bush:

“But — to be fair — I gotta defend President Obama on this. His main bump on the upper income people on taxes was letting the cuts that were enacted under the Bush administration [be made permanent]…”

It’s actually somewhat important to make this point, that Obama only solidified the Bush tax cuts for Americans making less than $400,000/year and it was part of a compromise that avoided cuts to social services. Moving forward, Clinton seems to make some good arguments about tax fairness and how certain types of income are taxed at a much lower rate than employment, like investments. Things are starting to wrap up now and Clinton asks Carter to make a closing statement.

“…extremely poor people are underestimated by us and they are just as good as we are.”

“I think in our country we have sort of an element of renewed understanding, that we haven’t solved, for instance, the race issue yet.”

“If we just listen to what’s going on and take steps to correct the problems that we face, then we’ll be much better off as a nation. But it takes a lot of political courage to admit that ‘we’ve made some mistakes and now let’s correct them’.”

I think you can make an argument that this last part of his statement was directed at Clinton. Carter’s body language is very telling, while saying “it takes a lot of political courage to admit we’ve made some mistakes”, he begins pointing outwardly; implying that it is in fact Clinton, who’s made these mistakes. And as discussed earlier, this is definitely true with respect to mass incarceration, which Carter again makes mention of in his final statement.

When setting up this chat, Clinton probably had hoped this conversation would provide some light faire and draw a flattering comparison between Carter’s exceptional public service record and Clinton’s own charity work. The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, who’s lack of transparency and questionable list of donors have lead many to question the authenticity of its yearly philanthropic “commitments”, desperately needs good press. The foundation has finally provided enough information to actually receive a rating from CharityWatch.org, as recently as April of 2016, just in time for Hillary’s debut at the Democratic Convention.

I believe Carter knew Clinton’s intent in inviting him on, and in this fifty minute conversation, Carter effectively touched on nearly every major progressive policy goal outlined by the Sanders campaign and others; most of which Hillary Clinton has deemed unattainable. Carter used his experience as president, his moral capital, and a strong grasp of international politics, to help lobby for progressive policy to the likely First Man. With an already healthy dose of respect, I am very proud to see President Jimmy Carter is still a cunning politician and brave voice in progressive politics.