After more than five months of intense and awfully petty partisan wrangling, the good news is Loretta Lynch finally became the next Attorney General of the United States. With it comes a little history, too, as now the first Black female Attorney General, following the position’s first Black male one.
The bad news, unfortunately, is that she’ll more than likely be out of the job before she even has a chance to put a mark on it.
It’s the political calendar that has defined Lynch’s nomination, that molded her confirmation and now stands to completely shape and limit her tenure. Her nomination was born of post-midterm election bad blood, Democrats failing to push her through before their last days in control of the Senate and Republicans holding her up as a way to reward the loyal conservative base that voted them into the majority. The confirmation tangled in other Senate business at a time new Senate Majority Mitch McConnell (R-KY) needed to show some level of defiance at the White House or risk the ire of activists on the right who’d most certainly accuse him of being soft.
This was all theater. Privately and off-record, Senate lawmakers and aides familiar with the intimate details of Lynch’s confirmation process knew a couple of months ago that she’d eventually be confirmed “by mid-April to mid-May.” Politicians simply need time to show airs.
But, the mess of it took so long that now she has only several months under two years to do her job. The final days of the Obama administration are around the corner. We are already in the waning, albeit unseasonably chilly, days of Spring. Summer is fast approaching, along with it those dogged humid days when even less gets done in Washington. Perhaps that’s a good thing; perhaps that gives her time to adjust to the new commute.
Knowing Lynch and knowing Eric Holder, the man she is replacing, the transition process had already been underway. Since she was already United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, among the more powerful federal attorneys in the nation who worked on key Wall Street, cybersecurity, terrorism and policing issues in tandem with Holder, she was already playing a central role on key facets of the Justice Department agenda. Her work on police brutality issues, including prosecution of NYPD officers in the grisly Abner Louima case and oversight of the Eric Garner case (which, notice, she never really pushed forward on as her nomination was on the horizon), gives her some credibility as she’ll be faced with federal probes into the tragic slayings of unarmed Black men by law enforcement.
But her time as AG could be so short-lived that her only real brand on the agency will be the history she’s made as its first Black woman head. That’s obviously not enough for the extremely capable Lynch. But an unforgiving political calendar threatens to pigeonhole her legacy. Not only will she be running against the clock of her boss’ lame duck status, but she will be forced to navigate a legislative branch that finds a handful of its Senators already launching presidential bids. Congress will be focused more on upcoming elections, with Republicans eager to re-capture the White House while maintaining their grip on the House and Senate.
Whether she can accomplish anything in that climate, along with the shortened window to do it, will be a testament to her skills.
That said, there is a school of thought that argues she could keep her job past President Obama … if she wanted to keep it.
Or, she could easily become a rallying point for unmotivated Black voters who are expected to stand down in this upcoming election out of both pure spite and the absence of their favored cultural son, Barack Obama, on the ballot.
All it takes is for Hillary Clinton, currently the lone announced Democratic presidential primary contender and presumed nominee, to simply pledge her support for an extended Attorney General Lynch tenure during the first Clinton administration.
First: Clinton is a former U.S. Senator from New York. She’s claimed the state as home. Hence, it’s only natural that she give props to one of her former constituents and ensure her Empire State base is held intact.
While risky for Lynch, considering the taint of presidential politics could impact her relationship with Congressional Republicans, it’s possible. She skillfully maneuvered a very contentious confirmation process, never breaking a sweat (at least not showing it) and always finding a happy medium between her boss and grumpy Senate Republicans. They seemed fine with that.
For Clinton, it’s the boost among Black voters she’ll need to gain their trust and support – especially among Black women. With a tight presidential election promised for 2016, Clinton will need 90 plus percent of the Black vote, without fail. In the most recent YouGov poll, her combined favorability ratings are only 80 percent – while Republican potentials like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) are actually showing 30 percent or more Black favorability ratings. She actually has 20 percent “unfavorable” ratings among African Americans, according to a Public Policy Polling poll, which is not good, and the only time she reaches 90 percent Black support in a hypothetical 2016 general election match-up is against Christie.
At the moment, we can’t see the numbers for Black women, the Black electorate’s most active segment. But her less-than-needed Black support numbers above suggest a somewhat lukewarm reaction from sisters, whom she’ll really need in 2016 (Black women voted, consistently, 96 percent for Obama in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections). And she needs something to shake off the growing tension between Black and White feminists over numerous issues (on display during the Oscars following actress Patricia Arquette’s backstage dismissal of Black women over the wage gap issue and the Fashion Police flap over actress Zendaya’s dreads). While some critics may contend those issues are slightly cosmetic and superficial on the surface, Clinton will need to find a way to bridge that divide as she enters the presidential fray.
Publicly announcing support for extending Lynch’s tenure, while not guaranteed if she won, could bring those numbers closer to Obama-level. The problem is that Clinton, famously cautious and over-calculating, doesn’t do bold stuff.
CHARLES D. ELLISON is a veteran political strategist and Chief Political Correspondent for UPTOWN Magazine. He is a also a frequent politics contributor to The Root, Washington Correspondent for the Philadelphia Tribune, weekly Washington Insider for WDAS-FM (Philly) and a panelist on MSNBC’s ‘Hardball w/ Chris Matthews.’ He can be reached @ellisonreport.
