Daily Pennsylvanian Endorses Shallow Politics

By Barry Slaff

While we might not reasonably expect any unit of the press to hold a high analytical bar, yesterday’s DP endorsement of Senator Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination exemplifies the deplorably shallow reasoning too common in politics. As an avid Obama supporter I would have taken issue with any endorsement of Clinton, but the argument given is uncharitable to both candidates and critically contradicts itself.

In the course of my election research I have come across several legitimate reasons for supporting Senator Clinton. Unfortunately, those reasons were conspicuously absent from yesterday’s DP endorsement. The editorial staff elected to cite the one example of Clinton’s legislative past that the Senator’s campaign can’t make go away fast enough: her miserable failure to affect health care reform in 1993. Forget the minority opposition—as chair of the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, she failed to convince any near-majority of Democrats to support the her proposal. The magnitude of the Task Force’s failure became clear in 1994 when Republicans campaigned on the numerous shortcomings of this failed “big government” legislation and won a majority in the House. One wonders why the DP selected this debacle to support the assertion that “[Clinton] has the ability to turn policy into reality.”

While the editorial staff acknowledges Senator Obama’s “charisma” and “leadership qualities,” they dismiss him on the grounds that “choosing the president of the United States is too important a decision to make based on hope alone.” This criticism is perhaps the most widely propagated and blatantly false criticism of Senator Obama: the substance of his platform can be easily observed from the “Issues” section of his website, which sports more than 60 pages of PDF files containing specific legislative recommendations on the nation’s most important issues. Senator Obama has found appreciable success in turning his ideas into action: his admittedly short Senate history contains several successful bipartisan provisions, including work with Senators Dick Luger (R-IN) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) that provide for missile management and spending transparency, respectively. In January 2007 Senators Obama and John McCain (R-AZ) introduced the Obama-McCain climate bill, which would cut greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds before 2050. Senator Obama’s substantial platform and bipartisan activity could be fodder for real discussion, so I am puzzled with the DP’s decision to instead criticize his campaign slogan.

Might we realistically ask the press to elevate its contributions to political discourse? Those hoping to find such elevation in the DP’s primary endorsements unfortunately found only disappointment.