Posted on 07/30/2015 10:02:01 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
In the first two parts of Salons conversation with Camille Paglia, we covered Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton, the return of the 90s sensibility, and then the rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
Today Paglia trains her devastating insight and wit on the rest of the GOP field look out Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. She also has some surprising thoughts on why Hillary Clinton will not be the Democratic nominee and why it would be unwise for Democrats to overlook the appeal of Scott Walker.
Catch up with the first two parts of our interview here and here.
The Tea Party has been very successful in pushing the Republicans to the right. Now youre finally seeing progressives understand they have to be active and aggressive if they want to exert power within the Democrats. The Sanders/Warren wing and #blacklivesmatter have changed the conversation. But Hillary remains the very likely nominee and she doesnt even feel like she needs to answer questions on TPP and Keystone, for example. The Sanders enthusiasm makes for good copy, but progressives are going to lose those fights. Where are the 16 Democratic candidates who might make for a more robust and lasting debate?
First of all, when we look at the abundance of candidates who have put themselves forward on the GOP side, compared to the complete paralysis of the Democratic party by the Clinton machine, I think you have to be worried about the future of the Democratic party. Young feminists are asking why there hasnt been a woman president and automatically blaming it on male sexism. But there are plenty of women Democratic politicians who are too scared to put themselves forward as candidates because of the Clinton machine. Theres something seriously wrong here with Democratic thinking. You either believe in the country, you believe in your party, or you dont!
Given the problems facing the nation, this passive waiting for your turn is simply unacceptable. The Democrats have plenty of solid, capable women politicians who are just too timid to challenge the party establishment. Well, excuse me, that proves they dont deserve to be president! You sure wont be able to deal with ISIS if you cant deal with Debbie Wasserman Schultz! The paucity of declared Democratic presidential candidates is a major embarrassment to the party. Look at that herd of eager-beaver competitive guys on the Republican sideoverflowing with energy and ambition. Theres even a woman, Carly Fiorina, who has no political experience and therefore no chance of winning, but she is bravely putting herself forward and speaking out. And she has impressively informed herself about international politics, which is a No. 1 requirement for any woman presidential candidate. I said in a recent op-ed for Time that women must take responsibility for mastering more than the usual social welfare issues. Women politicians have to develop themselves beyond the caretaking side of the spectrum. All this talk about the lack of women engineers and how thats somehow evidence of sexismoh, really? Its mostly a self-selecting process, as proved by the way that the overwhelming majority of women politicians around the world actually behave. What do they instantly gravitate towards? Social welfare, caretaking, the environment. They ignore military history and strategic geopolitics.
I have constantly said that Senator Dianne Feinstein should have been the leading woman presidential candidate for the Democratic party long ago. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is a very deft and clever behind-the-scenes legislator and dealmaker, a skill she acquired from her political familyher father and brother were mayors of Baltimore. Both of these women, to me, are far better politicians than Hillary Clinton. Hillary has accomplished nothing substantial in her life. Shes been pushed along, coasting on her husbands coattails, and every job shes been given fizzled out into time-serving or overt disaster. Hillary constantly strikes attitudes and claims shes passionate about this or that, but theres never any sustained follow-through. Shes just a classic, corporate exec or bureaucrat type who would prefer to be at her desk behind closed doors, imposing her power schemes on the proletariat. She has no discernible political skills of any kind, which is why she needs a big, shifting army of consultants, advisors, and toadies to whisper in her ear and write her policy statements. Theres this ridiculous new theme in the media about people needing to learn who the real Hillary Clinton is. What? Everything theyre saying about what a wonderful person Hillary is in private tells us that shes not competent or credible as a public figure! A politician, particularly a president, must have a distinct skill or expertise in communicating with the masses. Its the absolutely basic requirement for any career in politics.
If you dont have an effective public persona, if youre not a good speaker, if you dont like to press the flesh, if youre not nimble enough to deal with anything that comes along, then you are not a natural politician! And you sure arent going to learn it in your late 60s! Get off the stage, and let someone else truly electable on! All this silly talk about how wonderful Hillary is in private. Oh, sure, shes nice to the important people and the people she wants or needs something from! Then shes Pollyanna herself! There are just too many reports stretching all the way back to Arkansas about Hillarys nasty outbursts toward underlings when things arent going well. The main point is that the ability to communicate with millions of people is a special talent, and Hillary pretty obviously lacks it.
That said, is there a single candidate on the Republican side you could imagine as an actual president?
I thought that Mitt Romney was an excellent choice by the GOP four years ago, even though he was opposed by the Tea Party. He was an old-style Rockefeller Republican, a type that doesnt exist anymore. Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York when I was in college in the 1960s, and he was flooding the state university system with tons of money in an attempt to make it equivalent to the University of California. I was very grateful for what he did, because I had a superb education at Binghamton, with wonderful new facilities and funding of programs like the film society. Rockefeller collected abstract art. Its hard to imagine a Republican politician todayor actually a Democrat eitheras an art collector. He was such a sophisticated, genial man, but today he would be considered a RINO by many RepublicansRepublican In Name Only. Its unfortunate, because there was value in that old WASP patrician stylewhere people were born to wealth and privilege and yet they devoted their lives to public service.
At any rate, looking at this crop of GOP candidates, I dont see anyone right now who seems authentically presidential or who has the necessary gravitas.
Lets walk through some of them. The young senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.
Rubio is widely praised for his intelligence, but he comes across as unsettlingly glib to me. Hes sharp on foreign affairsthats a strong suit for him. But he seems oddly weightless, like a peppy young boy. I dont see any depth yet. Ted Cruzoh, lord! Cruz gives me the willies. The guy is a fanatic! Hes very smart, clever and strategic, and he has a fine education from Princeton, so people have to watch out for him. But I think he is self-absorbed and narcissistic to a maniacal degree. I will never forgive him for his insulting arrogance to Dianne Feinstein when the Judiciary Committee was debating gun control two years ago. Theres a two-minute clip on YouTube which I urge people to look at it. Cruz is smirkily condescending and ultimately juvenile. He peppers Feinstein with a long list of rat-a-tat questions, as if hes playing Perry Mason grilling a witness on the stand. He was trying to embarrass her but only embarrassed himself. A president must be a statesman, not a smart-alecky horses ass.
Rand Paul hasnt caught fire and his foreign policy stances can be wildly inconsistent, but he is interested in a host of issues civil liberties, the drug war, drones, privacy, the growth of the surveillance state that I certainly wish the left would raise, yet are not exactly in Sanders wheelhouse.
Exactly! Code Pinks Medea Benjamin wrote a protest book called Drone Warfare that is a very important statement. Ive been furious about the Democratic partys lack of pressure on the Obama administration about the obscene overuse of drones. As a libertarian, I find myself agreeing with Rand Paul on so many different social and political issues. Unfortunately, however, Paul lacks gravitas as a physical presence. The U.S. presidency has a highly ceremonial aspect. The president isnt merely a prime minister, a political leaderhes the symbolic embodiment of the nation. Therefore, physical attributes and vocal style are very important. Despite the cartoons that caricature and ridicule him as a befuddled boy with big ears, Obama has always known how to handle himself as a candidate and then president. He projects a sober, unflappable confidence and presents himself with elegance and graceall of which produced his success early on, when Hillary was the frontrunner in 2008. Many Americans were so sick of Bush, with that lumbering cowboy stance of his. And remember that terrible moment at a European summit when Bush came up behind the seated Angela Merkel and grabbed her by the shoulders? She jumped out of her skin. What an embarrassment to the nation! I was so happy when Obama took officefinally a president who projected class and dignity. Im talking only about persona here, not policiesbecause while I voted for Obama in 2008, I would not do it again in 2012, when I voted for Jill Stein of the Green Party.
In the primary debates, Cruz will benefit from having a tall and commanding physique, as Bill De Blasio did in the New York mayoral debates. On the whole, Republicans dont seem to realize that persona and self-presentation are crucial in a media age. For example, Rand Paul has obviously had his eye on the presidency for years, so its astonishing that he apparently has never given any thought to how he should dress or cut his hair or even stand in front of cameras. Its as if his idea of style was flash-frozen in the Everly Brothers era. The tall candidate often has a big advantage in any campaign. It wasnt the case with Jimmy Carter, but he was an exception. People do want a sense of implicit authority in the president. This is certainly what has also held women back from reaching the White Housethey dont present or conceive of themselves in an authoritative way. Dianne Feinstein is the only woman politician in America who has true gravitas. Im not talking about her policies, about which there is huge division in California. What Im saying is that candidates for president must have a perhaps unteachable quality of inward power and steadinessand Feinstein has it. Rand Paul neglected this issuewhich led to his surprisingly thin skin with the media. You would think after so many years in the public eye, he would be better about handling the press. But right out of the gate, he was arguing and sniping with a woman TV interviewer. It came across as petty and tackyutterly unpresidential.
In the same way, Sarah Palin, who I had great hopes for as a dynamic new type of frontier-woman politician, was way too reactive with the media. She was fighting with bottom-feeders half the time, and they dragged her down to their level. A major politician cant do that! You have to learn how to take it but give it back in ways that dont bounce back at you. You have to pick the right fights. Its a game that every politician must learnincluding the ability to satirize the media, which voters love. Being able to handle the media is an essential aspect to running for president, and here is where Hillary has failed abysmally in this campaign. You cant simply ignore the media or spew memorized talking points at them. Carly Fiorina is proving herself surprisingly superior to Hillary in knowing how to spar with the media.
Let me pull you back to the front-runners. Scott Walker.
I think that liberals are dangerously complacent about Scott Walker. Theyve tried to portray him as a madman, an uneducated rube, a tool of the Koch brothers. Right now, Walker seems to be the true GOP frontrunner, but I also feel he lacks gravitas. Hes not ready for his close-up. What is this oddity about so many of the GOP candidatestheir excessive boyishness, as if their maturation stalled? But Walker is a very talented and combative politician, with far more substance than liberals are allowing for.
The union issue is hugebecause as governor of Wisconsin, Walker went to war with unions and won. Liberals are caught in the past right now in their rosy view of unions, which were heroically established during the progressive era that reformed the abuses of the industrial revolution. But the union battle in Wisconsin had nothing to do with exploited working-class miners or factory workers. In his push to balance the state budget, Walker took action against the middle-class public sector unions, whose negotiations with municipal and state governments outside the arena of private competition have become an enormous drain on local budgets as the economy has worsened. There has been a history of rampant corruption in the public sector unions, coming from their cozy quid pro quo relationships with politicians. Liberals need to wake up about this! All they have to do is read the obituaries of the smaller newspapers in metropolitan New York to see how the early retirement and lavish pensions of the public sector unions have grotesquely drained taxpayer dollars. Obituary after obituaryso-and-so, aged 75, worked for fifteen or twenty years as a policeman or city sanitation worker, retired in his late 40s, and spent the rest of his life on the taxpayers dime, pursuing his hobbies of fishing, boating, and golfing. Great work if you can get it!
And then the teachers unions! What a colossal tactical error American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten (a longtime Clinton friend and donor) made several weeks ago in unilaterally declaring her unions endorsement of Hillary Clinton right in the middle of the Bernie Sanders surge. Probably for the first time ever, American liberals woke up to the corrupt practices that have become way too common in the political maneuverings of the big unions. The point here is that Scott Walker, in his defeat of the public sector unions, drew the roadmap for struggling municipal and state governments everywhere to balance their budgets, as he did in Wisconsin. Because who ends up suffering the most? Its the kids. All that money outrageously pouring into inflated pension plans has been gutting public education and community arts programs.
Exactly how have the teachers unions improved the quality of education in our big cities? Look at the dilapidated public schools in Philadelphia or in many other cities run by Democrats. The rigid and antiquated seniority system imposed by the teachers unions has been a disasterlast hired, first fired. So many young and vital teachers have been terminated during budget cutsthe entire future of the profession. The unions value seniority over quality, and its inner-city children who have paid the price.
In my opinion, Scott Walker still lacks seasoning, presidential temper, and a working knowledge of international affairs. But if Democrats try to use the union issue to take him down, theyre simply empowering himand were going to end up with President Walker.
The name Jeb Bush has not come up at all from you
[loud laughter] What a joke! I didnt remember him at all! This shows what a nothing he is! The major media have been constantly saying that Jeb is the GOP front-runner, which is utter nonsense. Its the same thing with Hillarythe polls have just been showing name recognition, nothing more. Ive been looking at the comments on political news articles since last year, and Jeb Bush seems to have absolutely no support whateverlike zero! To this day, Ive never seen an online commenter enthusiastically supporting him. Its really strange! All these rich people throw big money at him, but I dont know who his voters could possibly be.
If Jeb had run for president after his successful run as governor of Florida, he would have had a better chance. But he lost his chops during his long hiatus, and hes coming across as fuzzy and bumbling. Conservative talk radio is totally against himhes dismissed as the ultimate RINO. On the other hand, lets see what happens in the primary debates. It could well be that some of the younger GOP candidates will seem too shallow or shrill, and Jeb will gain because of his amiable personality and fund of government knowledge and experience. Voters might well go for him in the end as the safe choice.
And there you are with a Bush versus a Clinton, and another of the returns to the 1990s we discussed earlier.
Oh, I dont see Hillary as even getting as far as the debates! If things continue to trend downward for her, in terms of her favorability and the increasing scandals, then the Democratic establishment will have to take action to avoid a sure GOP win. Hillary has way too much baggage for a general electionthat should have been obvious from the start. If Vice-President Biden jumps in, that would change everything. I dont think Hillary wants to be defeated, so what Ive been predicting all along is that there will be a health crisis, and she will withdraw. Right now, her campaign is trying to change the headlines by releasing some new policy statement every day, but its not going to change the looming investigations into her conduct as Secretary of State. And of course the GOP is holding back its real anti-Hillary ammunition until shes the nominee. Then well all be plunged backward into the endless nightmare of the Clinton yearsit will be pure hell!
Im hoping, once we get to the debates, that Martin OMalley can show himself to best advantage. He was an experienced mayor and governor of Maryland, and he has an attractive, low-key temperament. Hes presented himself very well thus far in media interviews. Hes relaxed, open, and actually enjoys being with peoplewhich Hillary clearly does not. He has an outgoing, fun-loving Irish pol quality, which many people nostalgically remember from the Kennedy years.
OMalley, really? He hasnt caught much traction, has been supplanted by Sanders in hearts and minds and was very damaged by the protests in Baltimore, and the stories about his very aggressive police practices, and the way those strategies created the environment in which Freddie Gray died in custody.
Yes, thats true, but were still very early in the process. I feel that once we get to the debates, OMalleys actual hands-on, day-to-day experience with complex big-city governance will get traction. Right now were in a volatile period of slogans being shouted and passions about racial and immigrant issues boiling over. Thats whats currently driving the news, but were not at the point where people are sitting in front of their T.V.s and intently assessing candidates for the presidency. How is this person handling him or herself behind the podium? How is that person responding to questions or conflict? The actual debates are when the electorate is auditioning candidates for the presidency. Thats where Obama gained big on Hillary.
If Biden enters, Im not counting him out. Hes going to suck up a lot of Hillarys support. Ive never taken Biden too seriouslyhe always seemed like a lightweight. But the death of his son Beau, a nice guy with military experience who seemed on track for the presidency, has given Biden more gravitas than he ever had before. The way he handled himself at Beaus funeralstanding for five hours, personally greeting all callers. Biden comes in as someone who doesnt have enemies and who knows the departments of government and international affairs. He handles himself well in debateseven though Sarah Palin defeated him!
Biden doesnt have any of Hillarys negatives. Why do we want another divisive, polarizing figure in the White House? Who wants a president that half the country already hates? Does that make any sense? At a time when the U.S. has to negotiate with hostile or untrustworthy foreign states, youd think we would want a president who has the support and good will of the nation. People are tired of the polarization and looking for a uniter!
Camille Paglia gives me the willies.
Ted Cruz gives me the willies
There you go. Changed my entire political stance with that well though out argument.
OMG.
Rush will probably mention this part of her interview.
He mentioned one of the earlier parts of Paglia’s interview this week on his show.
It’s worth a read.
I think I would too. The woman is a crook. Her hubbie made out like a bandit during the Iraq war.
I imagine anything with a Y chromosome gives her pause...
Didn’t think Camille Paglia even liked “willies”?
But NEVER his willy my dear.
Not really.
There’s something for everyone.
Lol!
Poor Camille Paglia - those “willies” are just some tiny seed of heterosexuality trying to sprout...
It speaks very highly of Cruz that the Commies are scared of him.
Can’t argue with that.
Full quote:
......”Dianne Feinstein is the only woman politician in America who has true gravitas. Im not talking about her policies, about which there is huge division in California.”....
Camille Paglia is a terrific thinker with a machine-gun speaking style. Thanks for posting this article.
What Im saying is that candidates for president must have a perhaps unteachable quality of inward power and steadinessand Feinstein has it.
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