What I've Been Reading: A Political Autobiography (Late 2015 to Early 2016)

Not only have I gotten behind on my reading lately; I've also gotten behind in writing about the few books I've managed to read. This is a small step towards getting caught up, but only a small step, because in this entry I only cover one book. I originally intended to cover all the books I finished in the first few months of this year, but due to this particular book's current relevance, I decided to talk about it at some length and save the books I finished more recently for a future post.

Living History by Hillary Clinton
This, of course, is Hillary Rodham Clinton’s autobiography, covering her life from her childhood to a little after the end of her husband Bill Clinton’s second term as US president and her own election as US senator from the state of New York. Given that she has a better than even chance of becoming US president herself after the next election, it seemed like a good time to find out more about her from her own perspective (to be sure, when I read the book at the beginning of the year the presidential race was still packed with candidates, but despite Bernie Sanders’s impressive performance and the train wreck on the Republican side, Hillary has remained the candidate with the best chance of winning pretty much throughout). I can’t say that the book dramatically changed my views of her, either for better or for worse, but it was informative nonetheless.

Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t resist comparing Hillary’s autobiography to the book written by the man she wants to succeed. Based on these two books alone, he is a much better writer and his story is much more colorful. This isn’t to say she’s a bad writer (or rather she and her co-writers, as she had three ghostwriters help on her book) or that her story wasn’t interesting, just that where she is competent, he is brilliant. In a way, this reflects one of the biggest problems that has plagued her in her political career; she has a great grasp of details and is good at explaining things, but she has difficulty generating inspiration. However, as I have noted before, in governance if not in literature, inspiration isn’t everything, and in some ways it’s more important that a president be competent than that they be inspirational. Anyway, it’s not really a fair comparison. Hillary’s is a solid political biography, whereas Obama’s book is really literature, the sort of life story that would be considered an excellent book even if the person who wrote hadn’t gone on to become president of the United States. What’s more, when he wrote it, even he probably didn’t have any definite ambitions on the national political stage, as he hadn’t begun his political career. In other words, Obama was not writing as a politician who has to watch every word lest it damage his future prospects. Hillary, on the other hand, was, and the difference is readily apparent.

Despite the success of the American right wing in painting Hillary as fundamentally dishonest, her account for the most part rings true. The story of her mother, though told very briefly, is particularly interesting, as is her account of her own evolution from young Republican to Democrat. This particular part of her background has become a club for some on the left to beat her with, as they like to cite her admission that in high school she was a “Goldwater girl”. Having undergone a similar political evolution I find such attacks absurd, especially since someone who has proved open minded enough to change their views through a rational comparison of the different sides is in fact rather more convincing than someone who has been a true believer all their lives. A more legitimate angle for criticism is that in describing the period of Bill Clinton’s governorship and presidency, she expresses support for many of the problematic centrist positions he supported. However, even here there are some points that her critics seem to miss. For instance, in talking about the various welfare reform bills, she says that she told Bill and his staff that if the bill was too harsh, she would publicly oppose it. In the end, the final bill that came out of the Republican Congress had enough protections for the most disadvantaged to satisfy her, so she didn’t oppose it, but that was only after Bill had rejected more draconian proposals. Granted, it came be fairly argued that the bill that passed was still far too harsh, and Bill and to a lesser extent Hillary can be faulted for going along with it. What’s more, those who insist that she is untruthful may not accept her assertion that she pushed behind the scenes for a moderate bill. But while the first point is reasonable, the second is not, as her account is consistent with the rest of her record, even if it to a certain degree punctures the view of her as bearing major responsibility for the negative aspects of welfare reform.

While at times she seems to take pains to portray herself a pragmatic centrist, providing ammunition for her progressive critics, she also makes clear her advocacy for a number of progressive positions, from improving the status of women to protecting the environment. I also appreciated her positive remarks about the Dalai Lama and her account of confronting Jiang Zemin, then president of China, on the issue of Tibet. On a less serious note, the book constantly brought to mind her appearance on The Colbert Show, which amusingly poked fun at her tendency to drop names. Though they were talking about her book about her time as US secretary of state, in this book she also seems to make an effort to mention almost everyone who crossed her path, famous or otherwise. In most cases, she also makes an effort to say something positive about them, though there are several notable exceptions. While she praises Dick Morris’s political skills and says she encouraged Bill to consult him, she also acknowledges that he worked both sides of the political aisle and that he has “the people skills of a porcupine”. Unsurprisingly, she has nothing good to say about Kenneth Starr and her comments about Newt Gingrich are largely negative. I share her views about Starr and Gingrich, but while I can appreciate her inclination to otherwise follow that old rule “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”, especially if you are in politics, in retrospect she might have been wiser to, for example, more strongly emphasize the autocratic nature of Hosni Mubarak’s rule in Egypt as a counterpoint to her more positive remarks about him. Likewise, her relationships with people like Mark Penn and Rahm Emmanuel don’t look so good in retrospect. But all in all, given that she knew everything she wrote would be gone over for intemperate remarks that could be used against her, the caution that governs much of what she says about people is understandable.

Despite the cautious nature of most of her account, all the more inevitable given her personality and her political ambitions, Hillary still manages to get in flashes of the personal. Her stories of her childhood and college years give a revealing look at her background. Her discussions of some of the troubles she got into on the couple’s first political campaign are candid and occasionally show flashes of humor. Her defenses against the attacks launched against her and her husband, both during the campaign and during her husband's presidency, are generally quite credible, not surprisingly considering the outrageous nature of some of the attacks. Even at the time, it was clear to me that Whitewater, for instance, was much ado about nothing, and the partisan nature of Starr’s “investigations” (or, rather, desperate digging for the least little thing that could be used against the Clintons) were obvious to anyone with an ounce of objectivity. Certainly anyone who thinks there is anything to the “scandals” the right wing attacked Hillary and her husband for should read her account of them, and those who have acquired a vaguely negative view of her in general might find themselves seeing things differently after reading her book. While the dyed-in-the-wool Hillary haters will not believe anything she says, and even those on the left who dislike her will find as much to confirm their views of her as to contradict them, those who are more open minded but less knowledgeable about her are likely to emerge from the book with a picture of her as a person who, despite some missteps and occasional questionable viewpoints, is extremely talented and knowledgeable, and who has come through a lot of political fire to get where she is today. While the book is unlikely to convince readers that she’ll be an inspirational president who will institute dramatic changes, it may help persuade them that she would at least be a solidly competent one who will in general move things in the right direction, which is enough to make her vastly preferable to the potential disaster that her prospective opponent represents.

Political News from the US, the Philippines and Taiwan, Plus More Planet Discoveries

In the last few weeks, there have been quite a few interesting news items, some good, some not so good, but all worthy of talking about in some depth. Unfortunately, I’ve been too busy lately to do a lot of writing, so for now I’ll settle for a few quick comments on some of them.

In the US, it looks more and more like the US presidential election is going to come down to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (aka Donald Drumpf). While Bernie Sanders is still in the race, looking at the math it is highly improbable that he could end up winning a majority of the pledged delegates, and if Clinton ends up with a majority of the pledged delegates (as she is almost certain to do), there is no reason for any of the superdelegates who support Clinton to change sides, and no justification for protests by Sanders supporters that the establishment (in the form of the superdelegates) somehow stole the nomination for Sanders. I do think Sanders should stay in the race until the primaries are over, but I hope he and his campaign will focus on policies, rather than attacking Clinton, and I hope Clinton will make an effort to win over Sanders’s followers (the open-minded ones at least) by taking even more strongly progressive stands. As for how Clinton compares to Trump, I’ve addressed the question some in previous posts, and I will no doubt do so again. But to put it succinctly, anyone who thinks that, whatever Clinton’s real or imagined flaws, Trump would be in any way a better president for anyone inside or outside the US other than Trump himself and a very narrow group of other people (e.g., those who would rather see the country collapse and the Earth overheat than have to live near Muslims, undocumented people or other “undesirables”) is either ignorant, delusional, somewhat lacking in intellectual capacity or, in the most charitable interpretation possible, not thinking clearly. Trump would be a disaster, and Clinton would be at worst adequate and possibly even excellent.

Speaking of terrible presidential candidates, the Philippines not only managed to elect one, but did so in a landslide. Former Davos city mayor Rodrigo Duterte is supposedly a socialist, so his economic policies at least shouldn’t blatantly favor the elite, but his complete and open disregard for human rights and the rule of law is appalling. He claims he will wipe out crime through summary execution of criminals (he claims to prefer hanging them), and considering his seeming support for virtual death squads as mayor, he is likely to at least try to do what he has said, no matter how many innocent people get killed by “mistake”. Then there was his utterly appalling rape joke, which alone should have been enough to turn off most reasonable voters. He even aimed a crude insult at Pope Francis. It’s no wonder he has been compared to Trump. Unfortunately, the Philippines is now stuck with him. While it’s tempting to say that they deserve him because they elected him, there were plenty of Filipinos who didn’t vote for him, and even some of those who did may come to regret it. Unfortunately, tough talk appeals to a lot of people, especially those who want simple solutions to complex problems – here in Taiwan that has manifested in the form of bizarre statements by all sorts of people in support of the death penalty, such as asserting that executing one particular criminal will somehow prevent random killings in the future, despite there being no evidence that the death penalty in general (let alone a single execution) has a significant deterrent effect.

Meanwhile in Taiwan, we're finally getting a new President, as Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party is taking office four months after her landslide election victory. This will be the first time since Japanese rule ended in 1945 that the KMT (the Kuomintang, i.e., the Chinese Nationalist Party that fled to Taiwan after losing power in China) controls neither the presidency or the legislature, as during the previous DPP administration of Chen Shui-bian, the KMT held a solid majority in the legislature, whereas this time the DPP won a solid majority. Of course China is not happy about this, since the DPP is more inclined to stand up to them on sovereignty issues, but hopefully Tsai will not bow to the pressure China is already attempting to exert. In any case, while it's fair to expect some improvement under Tsai, outside groups still have to keep an eye on the DPP to make sure it remains responsive to the public.

A more unequivocally positive piece of news was the announcement of 1284 new exoplanet discoveries. While we still haven’t found a true twin of Earth (i.e. a planet with a size and mass very similar to Earth’s orbiting a star like the Sun at a distance similar to that of Earth’s distance from the Sun), in part because the methods used make detecting such a planet difficult, we are finding more and more planets that are comparable to Earth, and some that at least theoretically could be habitable by life as we know it. What’s particularly amazing is the Kepler telescope that has made these discoveries focused on what it actually a very small slice of the Milky Way galaxy, so the actual number of planets in the entire galaxy is vastly greater. It’s easy to forget how truly huge the galaxy is. The number of stars that Kepler observed for evidence of planets is a tiny fraction of the total number in the Milky Way, and from what I can tell, even some of these parent stars of the newly discovered planets had never been specifically catalogued, despite the fact that they are for the most part relatively near to us (relatively being a key word here, as the distances are still vast). The huge number of stars in the galaxy, not to mention the huge number of galaxies in the universe, is why I am pretty sure that there is certainly some form of alien life out there somewhere. The problem, as I have observed in the past, is that intelligent life capable of creating a technological civilization (and not destroying it again relatively quickly through environmental degradation, war, or some other means) may still be extremely rare, and given the distances involved, our closest neighbors of that sort may be too far for us to find them anytime in the immediate future. But just by searching we will learn a lot, and I suspect that in the next half century or so we’ll at least have found strong evidence of life (though not necessarily intelligent life) on planets beyond our Solar System. That at least will be some consolation if things are not going well here – though we should do our best to ensure that is not the case, by preventing the Trumps and Dutertes of the world from getting too much power.