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.
Hillary in her own words: “I have a million ideas. The country can’t afford them all.”
Hillary = Unbeatable
Get the picture?
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.
The Drive-By Media will be giving Hillary a Lewinsky very soon. Tim Russert will roll over and do a puff-piece interview soon and all will be back in balance.
“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.”
THE best description of what happened last week I have seen.
Herself the First of Charlatan has a see-through Pants Suit.
I agree. This is just another setup, like William the Impeached with that scripted encounter with the Truthers.
All of this crap is designed to sell newspapers with improbable headlines when it does not matter what they say. It is a year out from the election. No one is paying attention. You will not hear a word about this next summer and fall. No matter how badly Mrs. Clinton buggers up a debate when it counts, you can count on every network news station and every newspaper of note (except the WSJ) to trumpet how well she did and how she is a sure winner.
From another article on Hillary in today’s London Sunday Times:
If her opponents play tough, she can shrink and look like the intimidated woman beset by brutal men. If they treat her with kid gloves - all gallant forbearance and courtly deference - she can open up a can of whoop-ass on them as eagerly as a dockside bully.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article2788907.ece
Cackles is a real nut job. She could easily be pushed over the deep end, if only someone has the nerve to do it. Simple questions about current events befuddle her, but you know she has to be seething inside, ready to smash someone’s head with an ashtray. It’s the part of Hillary the whole world wants to see, the hate filled, narcissistic, demon driven kook that her close associates know so well.
I still can’t see the Democrats nominating anyone else. Somebody beats nobody any day of the week, and that’s who she is truly running against for the Democrat nomination.
Whose going to beat Hillary on the dem side? Obama is embarrassingly naive, Edwards sounds like what he is, a shyster lawyer selling a bill of goods to the jury.
Beyond that who is there? Biden? Kucinich? Gravel?
Mrs. Clinton has a lot of weak points as a nominee, and God forbid, a president. But she stands head and shoulders above the dem pack both in organization, presentation and competence.
I’m sick of Bushes and Clintons. Twenty years of them is too much. Time for new blood.
BTW, how do you make an image appear in a post?
Thanks and ping for later
Twenty eight if you count Bush’s years as Reagan’s VP.
What an insult. Strong women and feminists are not even close to being the same.
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
"We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society.”
"It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, for the few, and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity."
"We can't just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people.""
"We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own turf in order to create this common ground."
"I certainly think the free market has failed."
"I think it's time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector [oil] in the entire economy, that they are being watched."
"What I want to do is take those profits and apply them to alternative energy."
"I have a million ideas. The country can't afford them all."
Karl Marx or Frederick Engels said none of these things; Hillary Clinton said them all.
See here for more gems from Hillary:
http://www.nohillaryclinton.com/info/movies/quotes/index.htm
Alphagore needs to buy himself a brain.
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