It's a Politician's Prerogative to Change Her Mind

            David Brooks used his New York Times column on Friday to launch as screed against Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton.  The immediate cause of his ire was that he detected a change in Clinton’s position on the just concluded Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

            As Brooks noted, Clinton has “praised the deal 45 separate times, at one point calling it ‘the gold standard in trade agreements.” Relying on an “exhaustively reported account” prepared by a journalism student at Ithica College, he went on to note that Clinton has a history of changing her position on public issues.  Seems that Mrs. Clinton has changed her positions on same-sex marriage, tough sentencing, ethanol subsidies and granting drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants, among other things.

            Heavens!

            Mr. Brooks has rightly been hooted down in the comments posted by his New York Times readers.  I won’t add to the hoots except that I would like to point out that large numbers of Americans have also changed their positions on these and other controversial issues.

            What I thought was interesting about the column, though, was not that conservative pundit Brooks would go after liberal-leaning Clinton.  That’s de rigueur in our political system.  Brooks’ main beef against Clinton was not that she now opposes a policy Brooks supports.  He’s upset because Clinton is now “campaigning on a series of positions that she transparently does not believe in. She’ll say what she needs to say now to become Bernie Sanders in a pantsuit.”

            To Brooks, Clinton’s change in position goes to character, not her policy chops.  Changing her position makes Clinton a political opportunist, he says, who, “in order to navigate her way through the wilds of politics and the morass of an ungovernable nation . . .[will] do whatever she needs to do, say whatever needs to be said and fight for whatever constituency is most useful at the moment.”  Maybe “in an era of polarization and dysfunction . . .conviction, consistency and principle are the hobgoblins of little minds!” he sniffs.

            Brooks isn’t alone in making this kind of attack on a politician.  “Gotcha” journalism thrives on journalists highlighting instances of political hypocrisy, of mush-mouthed campaign pronouncements that can be interpreted in any number of ways, and out-an-out lying. 

            Has anyone forgotten that Gary Trudeau depicted Clinton’s husband in the Doonesbury comic strip as a waffle for all 8 years of the Clinton administration?

            I’m troubled by this.  I like to laugh at people exposed as hypocrites just as much as the next guy.  And I think a special level of hell ought to be reserved for politicians who either lie to the public or make reckless claims they haven’t properly checked out.

            But here, we have a politician who merely claims to have changed her mind on an issue she was bound to support when she was on Obama’s team as Secretary of State.  The treaty was not completed on her watch, things may have changed since then, and Clinton is not bound by team loyalty to continue to support the president.

            Let’s assume for the moment that Hillary was a completely blank slate with no reported positions—ever—on anything.  Having decided to run for office, and being really good at doing her homework, Hillary just happens to adopt the position most popular with the voters on every issue.

            Is there a problem? If not, then why should previous pronouncements be held against her as long as it’s clear what she supports now?

            We live in a democracy.  When we elect a politician, it should be because that politician has promised to pursue the policies we want.  We reward politicians who do our bidding with reelection. When they don’t do what we want them to do, we give them the boot.

            Some of our citizens prefer to be led.  They want our leaders to tell us what is good and then tell us what we have to do.  That’s why Donald Trump is at the top of the Republican polls.

            But the rest of us want to participate in our own governance. We see politicians as agents who have been employed to serve our needs.  Even when there is a conflict between an employer’s instruction and the employee’s conscience, the employee must either follow the instruction, resign (Kim Davis, I’m talking to you) or face termination. Like any other employees, politicians who decide not to follow the boss’s instructions are likely to get canned. 

            I, for one, do not want to be governed politicians who don’t care what I think.  And I also don’t want to be governed by people who don’t learn, can’t grow and won’t adapt to changed circumstances.  If an occasion arises when one of my elected representatives decides that the best course is to act inconsistently with his or her past pronouncements, I’m okay with that as long as I get to pass on it in the next election.

            We cannot have politicians who feel constrained by their own histories.  In such a system, politicians would avoid making any meaningful pronouncements.  We’d end up with inconclusively muddled public policy debates.

            Let’s worry less about what a politician thinks “deep down” and worry more about whether a politician is likely to keep his or her campaign promises, whatever they happen to be.