The historian Sean Wilentz is one of our more able, and more important, political thinkers, and for reasons that aren't exactly clear to me, I rather assumed he'd side with Barack Obama. But Wilentz, in Newsweek, endorsed Hillary Clinton. And his reasoning is fascinating:
So you don't find Obama's meta-arguments against "politics as usual" particularly convincing?
You cannot have a president who doesn't like politics. You will not get anything done. Period. I happen to love American politics. I think American politics is wonderful. I can understand why people don't. But one of the problems in America is that politics has been so soured, people try to be above it all. It's like Adlai Stevenson. In some ways, Barack reminds me of Stevenson.
Why?
There's always a Stevenson candidate. Bradley was one of them. Tsongas was one of them. They're the people who are kind of ambivalent about power. "Should I be in this or not... well, yes, because I'm going to represent something new." It's beautiful loserdom. The fact is, you can't govern without politics. That's what democracy is. Democracy isn't some utopian proposition by which the people suddenly rule. We're too complicated a country for that. We have too many interests here. You need someone who can govern, who can build the coalition and move the country forward.
Wilentz also, I think, overestimates Hillary's political appeal and her accomplishments within the New York electorate. Additionally, he sort of hand waves away the Right's loathing of her, and the possibility that she generates a unique cultural hatred among segments of the population. But his argument as to her pragmatism, her comfort with the politics of politics, seems more accurate by the day.
