Posted on 11/03/2007 5:53:27 PM PDT by Aristotelian
The old conventional wisdom: she’s inevitable. The new conventional wisdom: not so much.
The press loves a narrative. It drives our reporting and analysis, and the story for the better part of the past six months is that you might as well take a long nap between now and the moment that Hillary Clinton is sworn in as the next president of the United States.
If you were betting your life savings, you’d still be shrewd to put your money on the prevaricator, wherever she happens to be campaigning that day. But nothing is certain in politics; and the Clinton candidacy has been much less formidable so far than you have been led to believe.
The turning point, if it turns out to be one, was last Tuesday night in yet another Democratic debate. The hype was that Barack Obama was finally going to get tough with his main opponent.
But Obama seems unable to do such a thing. He sails elegantly above the fray, with complete paragraphs fluidly tripping off his tongue, his voice rarely rising above the even-tem-pered basso profundo of a college don. He has a quick grin, but not a rapier wit. He would have done rather poorly at the Oxford Union. Given several opportunities for a quick rhetorical kill against the frontrunner, he balked.
It was left to third-place John Edwards to keep hammering at Clinton’s core vulnerability: “The American people . . . deserve a president of the United States that they know will tell them the truth and won’t say one thing one time and something different at a different time.” You think?
It was up to another candidate, Senator Christopher Dodd, to remind Democrats that almost half the country have told pollsters they would never vote for Clinton. Shouldn’t that be a factor in the Democrats’ decision on their candidate for next year?
Edwards even sounded a little like a Republican Hillary-hater at times. “Will she be the person who brings about the change in this country? You know, I believe in Santa Claus. I believe in the tooth fairy,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
The next day, Clinton’s slightly rattled machine played the gender card, describing the way she’d been piled into by her rivals as a classic case of six men attacking a woman. She sent out a fundraising letter complaining about the “pile-on”. Yes, Clinton is a feminist until she gets into trouble and then she plays the wounded woman card. It’s not a new schtick, of course. She was a feminist until she had the chance to run for office in the 1980s and chose to coopt political power via her husband first.
She was a feminist until her husband was sued for sexual harassment in the 1990s, and she had to smear his accusers. And she’s still a feminist until she turns in a poor debate performance.
Her pollster, Mark Penn, reassured nervous donors the next day that female voters were saying: “Senator Clinton needs our support now more than ever if we’re going to see this six-on-one to try to bring her down.” Can you imagine a real feminist – like, say, Margaret Thatcher – ever using that kind of excuse after a rough prime minister’s questions?
What actually happened last week is that, finally, the real Clinton was exposed. Since last year, she has very successfully Photoshopped all the rough edges off her real persona and launched a campaign as a “new Hillary”. She glowed. Her hair was fixed into one style, as feminine and yet as authoritative as it could get. She smiled and smiled and smiled.
She was much better at public speaking. She even road-tested a new laugh on a few Sunday morning talk shows – a laugh that subsequently disappeared from her repertoire after too many people heard what they thought was a cackle. (She had also practised it so well that it came off identically on every programme – the kind of thing you can no longer get away with in a YouTube political culture.)
Every detail of every programme was in place. She had nuanced her pro-Iraq-war vote into a melange that somehow managed to satisfy the liberal base of her party without making her vulnerable to a gung-ho Republican next year. She even presented a new, less statist healthcare plan to erase the miserable memory of her last attempt in 1994. The press lapped it up, and Democrats increasingly leant her way as the safe bet.
But the flipside of her carefully calibrated new image and her meticulously balanced positions was that she increasingly came off as the completely calculating and untrustworthy pure politician that she actually is. The mirage of benign Evita-style womanhood worked so long as she could maintain the generous aura of an inevitable elder stateswoman.
Behind the scenes, of course, it was the usual story: sleazy, relentless fundraising, brutal pressure on any Democratic party figure not beholden to her and her husband, and polls, polls, polls. But somehow, the Bush-Cheney era worked like some electro-convulsive therapy on many Americans, instantly erasing any bad memories of the Clinton sleaze of the 1990s and wiping the reality of Hillary’s true nature from the national psyche.
Her discipline in keeping this new image afloat is extraordinary. But every now and again, the mask slips. An unsavoury Chinatown fundraising link emerged. And then she did something really stupid: she supported a Senate amendment sponsored by hard-right Republican John Kyl and neoconservative Democrat Joe Lieber-man, designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation and giving the Bush administration a green light to launch a possible air-strike against it. To a Democratic base already suspicious of Clinton for her vote for the Iraq war, this was unnerv-ingly close to Bush.
And then last Tuesday came her debate debacle. She kept trying to have it both ways on almost every question – and suddenly, everyone could see the old Clinton casuistry. YouTube only echoed her two-faced posture. Her answers seemed always designed not to express her real views – if, after all these years of positioning, she can be said to have any real views left – but pure calculation. She did this to herself. Probably tired, a little cranky and more than a little overconfident, the veil fell and the old “say anything to get or keep power” Clinton emerged into the stage-light.
It is enough to give Democrats pause before her coronation. Is it enough to derail her? I don’t know. I do know that in Iowa, the one state where voters have really engaged with the candidates and broken through the national advertising and PR machine, she is faltering. There, she is running neck and neck with Obama, and Edwards is fading. The problem with a campaign built on inevitability is that the minute the inevitability aura is punctured, much can unravel. If she wins Iowa, it’s probably over for Obama. But if she loses there, her strongest argument – that she can win – will crumple. And Obama will still have the money and organisation to fight on.
The good thing for the Democrats and for America is that the real Clinton is now running for office. She has abilities and policies worth weighing in their own right – rather than crowning her as Miss Inevitability. Obama, moreover, has yet to make the sale to many Democrats worried by his somewhat detached persona. He didn’t win last week’s debate. She lost it.
This isn’t over. In many ways, it has just started.
>>>I’m not an Andrew Sullivan fan, but good for him writing this.
Well don’t forget speaking very broadly gay guys like Andrew tend to dislike lesbians.
More to the point, from David Brooks’ column in the N.Y. Times:
CLINTON: Obfuscate? Son, let me tell you the truth, because you can’t handle the truth. We live in a world with enemies. We fight elections where people play rough. Who’s going to do it? These two pretty boys? The left-wing nutjobs in our party who sit around watching Bill Maher?
I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, leads to victory. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about in Santa Monica dinner parties, you want me at that podium. You need me at that podium. And I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to the self-righteous liberals who rise and sleep under the blanket of the very victory I provide! I wish you’d just said thanks and went on your way. In any case, I don’t give a damn what answers you think you’re entitled to!
GOV. BILL RICHARDSON: That was beautiful, Hillary. I love you.
“Well don’t forget speaking very broadly gay guys like Andrew tend to dislike lesbians.”
Color me stupid, but why is that?
There are a lot of people in this country who would like to see Hillary fall on her face.
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I guess resistance isn't futile. Thanks TruthShallSetYouFree.
Bull. With a pliant 4th Estate and tons of money , all this is just blather. All she needs to do is get to 47 or 48 % and fraud (ie illegals, etc) will get her over the top. She has the makings of another Chavez, and the Press is happy to assist.
Since there are two Hillarys in the race. ONe in each party, it is a no lose situation for the left wing crowd.
BTTT
“shared prosperity”
ie what is mine is mine, what is yours is negotiable.
There are really more than that, but I’m assuming you mean 9/11 Rooty?
“The problem, besides the resources (money and political sharpies) lined up behind Hillary, is that none of her opponents look like plausible nominees...a lightweight first-term senator with big ears, a lightweight former senator with nice hair, and a few candidates whom nobody takes seriously.”
I’ve urged Al Gore to run.
Why? I have no idea. It really makes no sense at all that gay men would be prejudiced against gay women, yet I’ve seen it for years. Subjectively it seems more pronounced in the Out-leftist gay guys.
As I indicated it’s a very broad statement and obviously inapplicable to many if not most gay men, but is wide enough in Andrew’s category to be noteworthy.
A catalog of these mysteries would require shelves of bound volumes. If Hillary serves eight years as president it will likely be 25 years hence before an objective historical review can be done of the Clinton impact on the nation. It will take that long for researchers to ferret out the truth.
The Clinton machine is a 24-hour-a-day criminal conspiracy of industrial scale that gets more efficient and ruthless the longer it runs.
Seeing a decent smile on that face, you KNOW it's been photoshopped. Her face has no real-smile muscles.
Atrocious subject...BEAUTIFUL JOB!!!
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