R.K. ...and you talk in your article about how all the horrible, terrible, right wing things that Clinton did - privatizing things, Glass-Steagall; look, his history as a president is a right wing victory basically...
A.R.: Totally.
R.K.: ...NAFTA and globalization and Obama has a great... frankly, I voted against Hillary because she was the head of the DLC. I didn't want a DLC president and I even interviewed Katrina Vanden and a couple others discussing the DLC aspect of Clinton versus Obama and I think everybody hoped that he would be something different, but actually he's probably as bad or worse, right?
A.R.: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I can't remember if I say this in the article, I know I do when I make this argument in the chapter, the book chapter that it comes from, that Clinton's victory, or Clintonisms and the purge of the democratic party, basically was a condition for Obama's existence basically.
I mean, for his approach to work Clinton having pushed through a welfare reform for instance was and having embraced as a democrat that element, that core element of the Republican agenda .is sort of what made it possible eight years down the road for Obama to campaign in the way that he did by tossing off little snide barbs about how you can't expect government to do anything or to do everything he would say, but taking smacks at the public sector along the way, talking the personal responsibility stuff, foreign policy, things the same and. look. I mean I know, I know a lot of people, I mean freaked out, frankly, when I said during the primaries that there really wasn't that much difference between Obama and Hillary Clinton and I understand why people freaked out, I understand why a lot of people had bad tastes in their mouths about her and her role in Clintonism, I mean, contrary to what some strain of feminists think, you don't have to be a sexist not to like Hillary Clinton.
I mean, I worked in the short-lived Harkin campaign for the democratic nomination in '92 and in that capacity we spent a lot of time playing close attention to the Clinton's operation in Arkansas and plus my father taught at the University of Arkansas for the last twenty five years of his career knew them pretty well and it's clear they were corporate pools from the beginning to end, always,but the problem was Obama wasn't any different and Obama said in 2007 for instance, he said already that he would expand the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan. I mean, he said it publicly, it's not like he said it in a bar to a stranger, this was, it was reported in an article, I can't remember now if it was the New York or where, maybe even the New York Times actually.
But I think a problem is when you get into the horse race aspect of politics, a good friend of mine would often point out that the way that American electoral politics has evolved now, it's like the difference between people who prefer Chevys to the people who prefer Fords. You either buy Fords or you buy Chevys and you do it because you do it, basically. You do it because your father did it, or whatever.
R.K.: And moving from the analogy, what you're basically saying, there's almost no difference between republicans and democrats?
A.R.: Well there are some and especially, I voted for Obama in 2012 even knowing what he was and wasn't. I did it as I have voted in the most of the votes I have cast in my life, because the other guy was worse. So, and there are those dimensions.
As I said a little while ago, you can count on the democrats at least for now, the contradictions within the democratic party are such that in the short term, they can maybe, you know, they may be more inclined to slow the rightward slide, or to proceed more gently with the rightward slide than the republicans do. And that's not nothing. In the electoral realm, that's the only choice we have.
R.K.: You say in your article, since Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, serious democratic candidates have insisted that because of appealing to the right agenda is necessary to win, the responsible left must forgo demands for specific policies or programs as quid pro quo for their support. As his reaction to left criticism of his approach to healthcare reform illustrated, the Obama administration defines as "responsible those who would support it without criticism. Those who do not are by definition the far left and therefore dismissible."
A.R.: Yes, and I guess, from some of the responses to my article, I belong to that far left.
[Laughter]
R.K.: Thank you.
A.R.: And look, I mean that's kind of the way you would expect, or you can kind of expect it to go with mainstream democrats, right? It's been like that since the late 40's, too. But, the difference is, what's gotten worse, is that if we don't have anything, well we're not in a position to demand anything of them, right, and since Clinton, the move has been, I'm going to win if you don't shut up and get behind me either it'll be the end of civilization if a republican wins or I won't give you access to me if I win, or both. So, it's basically you don't have any alternative but to vote for me on whatever terms I put out there. Because, what's your alternative? I think that posture among democrats is what's led many people on the left to get juiced by third party candidates, but that really is a quixotic exercise and I've voted for one. I've been part of a third party initiative myself in the 1980's. I was actually an elector for Barry Commoner and the Citizen's Party after I voted for Ted Kennedy against Carter in the primaries. I understand the impulse and I voted for, as I pointed out publicly, I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, partly because I vowed in 1988, when I lived in Connecticut, I would never vote for Joe Lieberman for anything, but also because of the right tilting campaign that Gore ran in 2000, which is something that the Gore supporters don't ever want to mention; that and the fact that no matter what the native voters did, he would have won the presidency if he could have only carried his home state of Tennessee.
But, I will say this about that experience, in the experience of the 2000 election, what struck me was how vitriolic democratic activists hacks, whatever and the labor movement elsewhere, got then and still get about the idea that any progressives would have voted for Nader or that Nader would have run.
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