Mysteries solved by definitions

From This week’s WaPo mystery: What, exactly, are Hillary’s accomplishments? by Ed Morrissey.

Morrissey is making the argument that Hillary Clinton has no substantive achievements other than coat-tailing and winning elections and appointments. And he does a reasonably persuasive job of succinctly making his case.

To be fair, the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty doesn’t frame her story on the struggle to find any Hillary Clinton accomplishments as a mystery. The headline reads, “Hillary Clinton tries to show that her record is more than just talk,” and Tumulty approaches it as a race to see whether Hillary can define herself before her political foes do. Having framed it that way, Tumulty notes that voters can’t name any achievements for Hillary other than winning two Senate elections and becoming a State Department frequent flier. And then, Tumulty proceeds to list … no accomplishments at all:

In polls and focus groups, Republicans are sensing a vulnerability in Clinton’s record that could compound the difficulties she is facing with the controversy over her decision as secretary of state to use a private e-mail account and server rather than a government one.

When Bloomberg News posed the question in May to a focus group of 10 Iowa Democrats, they praised Clinton for strength, experience and competence but could not recall a single thing she had done.

Some Democrats say that they have only a vague sense of Clinton’s actual accomplishments. Liberal activist Arnie Arnesen was the Democratic nominee for New Hampshire governor in 1992, and she often crossed paths with the Clintons as Bill Clinton made his first bid for the White House. But all these years later, Arnesen said: “I don’t really know Hillary. I know Hillary under Clinton. I know Hillary under Obama. And in the Senate she was a workhorse, not a show horse. What does that mean? It means she didn’t take a leadership role.”

Tumulty actually does list a couple of claims from Hillary and her supporters of accomplishments. Unfortunately, they both belong to others. Most recently, Hillary took credit for agreeing to a key concession that allowed for the deal with Iran, which was to accept the Iranian production of nuclear fuel. This concession took place over three years ago, which means that the concession didn’t actually accomplish much at the time. Barack Obama and John Kerry had to give up a lot more, including anytime-anywhere inspections to ensure that those limits were respected, especially at military sites. Besides, the Iran deal has the support of a whopping 21% of the American public, so hitching one’s wagon to that star has some very obvious problems.

In other words, Hillary wants to claim a piece of someone else’s work. The same is true of the only other potential “achievement” Hillary and her team have claimed, an expansion of health insurance access for children during Bill Clinton’s presidency. That, Tumulty explains, was actually the work of two Senators, and she initially helped Bill shoot it down:

Yet some of what she touts as accomplishments have been disputed. In a five-minute video released on the eve of her campaign’s formal launch in June, she suggested that she was the force behind the expansion of health coverage to children in the 1990s.

After her push for universal health care failed, she said in the video, “I was really disappointed. But you have to get up off the floor and you keep fighting. So I got to thinking, ‘Let’s see what we can do to help kids.’ ”

In fact, however, that legislation was created and driven by two senators, Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). At one point, then-President Bill Clinton turned against it, fearing that it would destroy a balanced-budget deal, and Hillary Clinton defended her husband, saying, “He had to safeguard the budget proposal.”

It was only later, when Kennedy and Hatch brought the bill back up, that Hillary lobbied for its passage. That’s not an “achievement” as much as it is a demonstration of influence on her husband during his presidency. That may be laudable, but if those two stolen moments are all Team Hillary can provide, then it turns this question into a real mystery.

Morrissey is a partisan critic of Hillary Clinton but he also has good material to work with.

Right at the end of his article, Morrissey identifies the really interesting mystery. You can argue about whether experience and achievements are actually important criteria in selecting a national leader. I think they are important considerations but that there are other considerations as well including ethics, character, intelligence, etc. According to a CNN poll, among both Republicans and Democrats, agreeing with the candidate on the issues is more important than whether the candidate has experience.

The interesting exception is among Hillary Clinton's supporters. They believe that experience is more important than agreement on particular issues by a margin of 58:32, far greater than all other voters.

Stepping away from the politics of it all, this is, to me, the more interesting mystery. There is a group of people out there who profess to hold achievements as one of the most important attributes of a candidate and yet their support is pledged to the candidate with the smallest record of achievement. Regardless of what you think of them as individuals and as candidates, Bernie Sanders can point to a lifetime of ideological independence and consistency, to having been a consistent supporter of civil rights, and to having had his hand in some major national legislation. O'Malley can claim executive experience (and achievements) as Governor of Maryland. Hillary Clinton has nothing so substantial.

So how to explain this rather stark inconsistency. First, I think it reinforces what we all know which is that political opinion and punditry has the substance, consistency and reliability of a summer breeze. It feels good but it doesn't amount to much. We know this but then we treat such blathering as if it were important.

Second it casts doubt on the substance and reliability of polling, another topic about which we know to be exceptionally cautious and yet about which we instinctively treat the numbers as if they were actually credible.

More than that, what I suspect that this comes down to is an illustration of the importance of context and definitions.

It seems likely to me that Hillary Clinton supporters must be defining accomplishments differently than most people. I think the vernacular sense of accomplishment is "what outcome have you achieved?" And outcome is meant in the sense of "what is different in a positive way because of your involvement?" In this sense, Hillary Clinton has few or no accomplishments. Who is better off because of actions she undertook or led? I think Clinton supporters have a definition that is just marginally different. Not "what outcome have you achieved?" but "what have you achieved?" It seems an immaterial distinction but it is substantial. It is the difference between valuing the process versus valuing what the process produces.

For a Clinton supporter then, the accomplishment is being nominated and confirmed as Secretary of State (which is definitely an achievement) rather than the outcomes that were achieved (Benghazi deaths, destabilization of Libya, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, loss of credibility among critical allies, failed rescue missions, compromised intelligence, etc.).

If this construct is true, it explains how they can emphasize the importance of achievement without being bothered by the absence of positive outcomes. But it also illustrates the importance of context and definitions at the individual level and the danger of glossing over the schisms between individuals which are masked by averages.