The Threshold Ploy: I Kind of Like It

I generally like Daily Kos even if I think their posting is a pretty vanilla version of the left-wing views I hold as well. Contrary to Kos top-poster devilstower though, I thought today's Hillary gambit on national security was pretty well done. It was a two-part rhetorical manuever. First, Hillary defined the "commander-in-chief threshold" as a kind of magic criteria for evaluating presidential candidates. The idea is that people shouldn't vote for anyone for president who they can't imagine as crossing the threshold of being credible in wielding the imperial power of the United States. In retrospect, the American public was mistaken in thinking that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had ever crossed that threshold and we now realize the gravity of our collective error.

Then, she claimed that both she and John McCain had crossed that threshold and challenged voters to determine whether they thought the same of Barack Obama.

“I think that since we now know Sen. (John) McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold. That is a critical criterion for the next Democratic nominee to deal with.”

I don't agree that John McCain has crossed any kind of threshold about being commander-in-chief. McCain's basically another Dick Cheney, somebody who's developed the ability to sound rational and informed in relation to defense policy at the same time he's a completely unhinged warmonger.

But Hillary's running against Obama right now rather than McCain. So there's no harm in implying that she would be seen more as McCain's equal on foreign policy than Barack Obama and I'm sure that Hillary herself believes that. Despite his many weaknesses as a candidate, John McCain does have a lot of political capital as a "straight-shooter" on national security and other issues. As a result, there is a real question about whether Obama would be taken seriously on national security issues during a general election campaign and Hillary is right to try to figure out a way to push the question to her advantage.

Another thing I like about the idea of a "commander-in-chief threshold is that she introduced the concept while forwarding her own proposals on the war effort in Afghanistan. But did The Chicago Tribune's "The Swamp" report what those proposals actually were?

Not on your life.