Ambition In Politics Is Good: Kirsten Gillibrand Edition

While most of the political media is currently going bananas over Michael Wolff's new tell all book about Trump's first year, a columnist named Ciro Scotti at The Daily Beast decided to mix things up and write about possible 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Kirsten Gillibrand instead.

This is a good idea, at least on paper. After all the Democratic Party seems to still control it's presidential nomination (well at least in theory) and so the crucial "invisible primary" stage of the process has been underway about 5 am November 9th, 2016. And a lot has already happened! Obscure but important changes have happened to the delegate selection process with some states switching to primaries and California moving the date of theirs up. Likewise a number of behind the scenes political battles have already been fought. With the "progressive/Sanders" (or whatever you want to call them) wing winning in their foolish quest to reduce the number of "superdelegates" while losing the larger war to the "establishment/regular/not-Bernie" (or whatever you want to call it) wing when it comes to more radical changes  to the nominations process and control of the formal Democratic National Committee itself.

Likewise some candidates, like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, or Martin O'Malley are obviously doing the sorts of thing you do when you are signaling to the "expanded party network" that you are running while not formally declaring.

So it makes sense to talk about Kirsten Gillibrand and 2020. She's in the spotlight more and more after the Franken Fiasco and she hasn't given a Shermanesque refusal, so as far as I can tell she's in the hunt for 2020, which of course doesn't mean she'll be running in 2020. 

Unfortunately instead of saying something interesting about Gillibrand, we got, well this sort of dreck:

The larger question about Gillibrand, though, is whether she is too transparently opportunistic to be a viable candidate after the rejection of another New York politician criticized for basing her positions on supposedly canny calculations rather than on from-the-gut convictions.
...
For Gillibrand, nearly every move seems to be a self-serving playing of the angles. While it’s not surprising to see a politician behave this way, Gillibrand seems to be an especially egregious practitioner of the finger-in-the-wind politics that so many voters can no longer abide. 

This is of course the sort of sexist double standard that often gets applied to women in politics. The  state senator with the funny name using his chance to address the Democratic Convention back in 2004 as a way to introduce himself to the nation and showcase himself to his party as a man to watch in case John Kerry couldn't pull it off wasn't being "transparently opportunistic." No, no, no. Likewise FDR wasn't being "transparently opportunistic" when he used his nomination speech for Al Smith at the 1924 Democratic Convention to re-enter political life and set himself up for replacing Smith as governor four years later. And Abraham Lincoln wasn't being "opportunistic" when he auditioned for the position of "guy other than Seward" to a bunch of anti-Seward party bosses by giving his famous speech at Cooper Union. Likewise his whirlwind speaking tour of New England afterwards was not part of "opportunistic" strategy of winning delegates for the upcoming convention in Chicago.

I apologize for the sarcasm, but the claim that "she's not qualified because she wants the job" is pretty frustrating after years of seeing it over and over again with Hillary Clinton's run for the White House in particular or the ongoing push to silence her since.

Moreover it gets how our political system works exactly backwards. Our political system is one that is based on the idea that politicians are going to be "opportunistic" in that they'll be driven by ambition, and so we might as well harness that ambition to serve both as a check on other politicians, as well as a way to drive politics forward. As Jonathan Bernstein put it back in the day:

You remember what Madison says in Federalist 51: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The constitution, with its separated institutions sharing powers and federalism, depends on the self-interest of politicians to work. If our politicians were altruists, we’d really be in trouble; they’d be eaten alive, either by the remaining ambitious ones, or by the various and many self-interested folks outside of government. So we expect, and probably need, politicians who have a more-than-normally-healthy amount of drive, self-interest, and ambition.

(See also here and here).

Don't get me wrong. There are political systems where ambition can be a real problem (which is why K'mpec makes Picard Arbiter of Succession!) and there is a very real human cost to our ambition focused political system, but then again it's the system we're kind of stuck with. Gillibrand's "opportunistic" ambition will serve her well if she makes it to Iowa, and the ambitious pursuit of being a successful president would serve her well in the White House as well.