Clinton testified because she was carrying out a long-term career plan that assumed she’d ultimately be rewarded for her fealty to the system and her compliance with its formalities.
Her plan failed. Her assumptions were wrong.
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Whatever Clinton’s motivations for testifying were, she did so in accordance with the law. If she’d refused to testify she would be perceived—accurately—as flaunting the authority granted Congress by the U.S. Constitution. Instead she rolled her eyes and went along with it, proving she didn’t have anything to hide and making the Republicans questioning her look like the partisan jackasses they were in the process.
If Biden just says “I don’t need to comply with this subpoena because it’s part of a partisan witch hunt” then he makes himself—and by extension, his party—look like a bunch of hypocrites who don’t actually care about rule of law any more than their Republican opponents.
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Clinton was strongly dedicated to public service from childhood; the idea that she was a calculating and cynical creature of pure self-interest was part of the Republican smear that dogged her from her days a First Lady of Arkansas. She testified because even with the hyenas in charge the House was an offiial arm of the country she honors.
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Yeah, I’m sure self-interest factored into her decisions and decades of bad-faith attacks from the GOP would make anyone a bit cynical, but c’mon. She dedicated her entire professional life to A) the law and B) public service. The idea that she’d have happily blown off a congressional subpoena if she hadn’t been planning to run for higher office simply isn’t borne out by her previous conduct.
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Admittedly a side note, but: was she honoring her country when, just to choose one example, she helped destroy Libya and kill Gaddafi, applauding the latter’s dog-in-the-street torture and death like some kind of blood-lusting emperor?
Let’s not blind ourselves please to the roles she’s played in dishonoring the U.S., by helping out with its abuses of other countries and their people.
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In that vein, there’s also her vote as Senator authorising the Cheney Regency’s debacle in Iraq in 2003. No-one misses Gaddafi or Saddam, but her decisions only led to more disaster and suffering for their victims.
There’s also her perpetuating Third-Way big-money donor policies and neoliberal-lite economic policies that both degrade liberal democracy and also allow hypocritical GOP opponents to make bad-faith attacks on her that helped lead to her defeat in 2016 (a preview of Biden in 2020).
By all means, give her a cookie for respecting rule of law and adhering to civic norms in the course of her public service. It’s more than Biden is capable of, but also it’s obviously going to take more than that to keep the country from sliding further into oligarchy.
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She was implementing the foreign policy of her government. Of course, she was presumably an active part of the decision made by Obama and the other cabinet officers present, but yes, she was doing her duty to her president and her country. One can argue that the decision was wrong(*), but it is not inconsistent with US foreign policy as it was carried out prior to the current administration, with people democratically chosen and approved in their roles, presumably people with sound judgment and expertise, discussing pros and cons of an action and then implementing it, wisely or not.
I don’t grieve for Gaddafi, who was an autocratic dictator and brutal murderer. I do grieve for the innocents we killed on our raids, but when Obama and Clinton approved the raid its intent was not to kill children. The same cannot be said for Gaddafi’s intent, eg with the bombing of Flight 103. The 2011 intervention was a terrible mistake and yet another blot on the US imperial record, but that doesn’t mean that Gaddafi wasn’t a blood-lusting emporer.
(*) It was.
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It’s perfectly reasonable to criticize Hillary Clinton for her policies, her judgement, and the effects that the fallout from her policies and judgement have had on the world stage.
However I have not seen any evidence that Hillary Clinton is a scofflaw with a general contempt for the law in general or Constitutional process in particular. I honestly think that “disregarding a Congressional subpoena” was never something she seriously considered during the Benghazi investigation. Heck, it’s probably not something most Republicans would have seriously considered doing in the pre-Trump era.
By echoing the Republicans’ stance that “subpoenas only matter when they come from someone who isn’t out to get you for partisan reasons” Joe Biden is helping to normalize a total disregard for Congress’ Constitutional authority to conduct investigations.
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(I’m still having a hard time understanding how she’s polling lower than Biden. Having an even more difficult time understanding how Biden is polling that high in the first place.)
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Good feels from the time of Obama and name recognition mostly.
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That’s not a terrible reason to support him; odds are he’d run the White House in much the way it was run under Obama, albeit less articulately and without basketball.
As for Klobuchar, she hasn’t really been tested yet. If she becomes a leader then she will be attacked by the same chunk of the party base that has been relentless in their attacks on Biden, that drove Harris out of the race and that has lately been directing huge amounts of energy against Buttigieg. In Joe’s case the attacks have become stale and repetitive, so have less force. (Kind of like what happened with Trump in the last general election.) That probably makes his position more stable than any of the others.
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He’s also the preferred candidate of the DNC establishment and big-money donors, which tends to give a Dem candidate a leg up in terms of public profile and local support by Dem organisations and the corporate media. A lot of voters also simply assume that being VP under the last Dem President means that he should be the next Dem President. And we can’t discount the fact that he’s an old white straight male promoting “safe” neoliberal-lite policies – it’ll take at least a couple more election cycles before the Boomers finally lose their electoral clout.
So, unfortunately, Biden has a good shot at being the Dem nominee in 2020, even though his policies are uninspiring and he’s bound to screw things up in the general election and is likely to lose to Il Douche (which his supporters – like Clinton’s in 2016 – will blame on progressives rather than on his own shortcomings).
If he somehow wins, his stated goal is to return the country to Obama-era “normalcy”, which is unsustainable under the new circumstances of climate change, economic inequality, and the resurgence of right-wing populism and fascism around the globe.
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Also, most Democratic voters are more centrist than your average BB poster in these political threads. A lot of people actually like “moderate” positions on a lot of things, without automatically being stupid, evil, or ignorant.
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If the moderate (status quo) position is to have unequal rights then I will strongly argue that it is being stupid, evil and ignorant. I’m not going to sugar coat it for them anymore, I have tried that for my entire adult life and it didn’t work. If they think that actual fascists are worth listening to, as so many do today, then they have lost me.
And if fascist needs to be defined:
http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf
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True.* A lot of Dem voters, perhaps the majority and tending toward the older, will go for what they perceive as the “safe” and established choice, just as American consumers tend to go for the “safe” and established brands. Biden is effectively the McD’s of the Dem field, and McD’s is popular even though it’s not healthy in the long run and will give one the trots in the short run.
The Happy Mutants tend to be less prone to inertia and (after doing a cost-benefit analysis) can be more willing to take a risk on something new, so the view here is definitely more skewed toward progressivism.
[* ETA: at least as far as candidates are concerned. As @DukeTrout notes below, on positions like single-payer universal and free/subsidised college education 70% of the electorate seems to share the same view as those on BoingBoing]
Other issues aside, the “moderate centrist” position becomes increasingly untenable and ineffective when right-wing populists are seriously vying for power. The idea that such politicians or their supporters can be met halfway or reasoned with is absurd.
It’s not a particularly effective position when dealing with the modern GOP establishment, either. For more than a quarter century, Republicans have made it clear that they’d operate in bad faith and outright cheat. And yet Uncle Joe, like Charlie Brown with the football, still thinks he can work with them.
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Had an interesting (in the BB sense of “interesting”) conversation with a wannabe family member who described himself as a “radical liberal” while stating he had given up on Dems and might as well support a republucan because “in the 10 years since Obama care passed, there has not been one bit of progress.” 
When I pointed out that dems have not had control in those 10 years, he said it shouldn’t matter. I then asked if he had been paying a bit of attention to what was going on, which pissed him off and he told me to go vote for Biden then. I told him I would vote for rabid dingo kidneys vs. Trump. He told me I was stupid and just did not understand. If this is at all representative of the early 20s voters out there, we may have a problem.
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Young people are understandably angry at the unwillingness of candidates like Biden to address their concerns, and anger combined with a lack of maturity tends lead to “it shouldn’t matter” comments like his (see also young, usually white BernieBros). I can only hope that the jury is still out. As Malcolm Harris says:
If, as blockbuster audiences seem to both fear and relish, America is quickly headed for full-fledged dystopia, it will have gone through us Millenials first, and we will have become the first generation of true American fascists. On the other hand, were someone to push the American oligarchy off its ledge, the shove seems likely to come from this side of the generation gap, and we will have become the first generation of successful American revolutionaries. The stakes really are that high.
I’d add that the differentiating factor between most Biden supporters and the Happy Mutants here is that the former don’t recognise or (thanks to privilege) don’t have to recognise that that the stakes are that high, and can thus afford complacency.
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My conversation would have been some degree of agreement with them (I’m not sure where I would place them politically, most people on the radical left strongly reject identifying as liberal), while pointing out that however bad Biden is, he would still be better than Trump, and that if they want change they will have to fight for it and not expect the government to do it for them.
Also throw in that minorities are allies, not enemies, and that class reductionism won’t work as it refuses to accept that it is creating new (actually old) underclasses of it’s own.
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Why is she polling lower than Joe and Peter?
One word: penis.
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