Why Hillary Clinton isn’t a done deal

Despite its auspicious beginnings in about 500 BC and subsequent debate, the idea that nature abhors a vacuum was imprinted upon American consciousness by President Theodore Roosevelt, who used the phrase not only as part of a moral obligation for international presence and war, but in the everyday dedication of facilities intended to shape the character of the nation's indigent.

Why should the United States involve itself in foreign affairs? Roosevelt argued that disengagement by other countries left a vacuum the nation was obligated to fill. Why should communities celebrate the opening of YMCA facilities? Idle hands do the devil's work, Roosevelt cautioned.

Perceived Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton made a strategic error in ignoring such warnings.

Whether considered devils, saints or something in between, 2016 Democratic upstarts are providing a modern-day example of what happens in a political vacuum: ideas and messages emerge to fill the void.

Name recognition and, in Iowa, the vestiges of a failed 2008 caucus fight have kept Clinton ahead in polls solely focused on the horse race. For many Iowans, the names of other potential candidates - Bernie Sanders, Jim Webb, Elizabeth Warren, Martin O'Malley, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, Brian Schweitzer - aren't as well known, and the work of connecting policy issues to people is only beginning.

But when it comes to policy issues such as criminal justice and education reform, unemployment and wage decline, and the presence of money in politics, Iowans are becoming more interested in and aligning with the upstarts. And unfortunately for Clinton, many of the policy positions filling the vacuum cast doubt on her candidacy and leadership.

During his recent jaunt through Iowa, for instance, former Maryland Gov. O'Malley advocated for reinstating the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act as a central part of financial reform that would prevent another 'Wall Street meltdown.”

The law, a collective reaction to the 1930s market crash, set up regulatory firewalls between commercial and investment banks. In the mid-1950s, Glass-Steagall was extended as the Bank Holding Company Act to further separate financial activities by prohibiting insurance underwriting.

Glass-Steagall was repealed in November 1999 when the much less restrictive Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

Most financial experts believe the repeal played a significant role in the formation of the housing bubble that built over the next decade and ultimately burst in 2008 at the end of George W. Bush's presidency, attaching economic negatives to the entire 2008 GOP presidential field.

While removal of Glass-Steagall was a bipartisan effort - Republicans led by Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, who served as John McCain's economic adviser during the 2009 elections, championed deregulation, forwarding the relaxed rules to the President's desk - Clinton continues to be viewed by many Democrats as a failed gatekeeper, due in part to the criticism leveled by an Illinois senator who finished first in the 2008 Iowa caucuses.

Then, like now, it made little difference that the Clinton name wasn't included in the critique, or that the executive pen was in the hand of Bill, not Hillary. The unvoiced implication was enough - especially in the absence of information to the contrary.

' Comments: @LyndaIowa, lynda.waddington@thegazette.com or (319) 339-3144