Yes, but-

30/09/2007 01:05

Font size:

Dan Benbow

Will Hillary shatter the glass ceiling?

Few passionate defenses begin with the words yes, but. A year to this Labor Day weekend ago, after a long day into night of flights and layovers and connections and delays, I arrived late one evening at a barbecue and after a few minutes to meet and greet and drop my bags found myself standing around a fire with a tasty cup of Octoberfest talking about the 2008 presidential election with two friends. When Hillary Clinton’s name came up they both started with a look and a pose that indicated deep, unsettling distaste.

I wasn’t excited about Hillary's candidacy, but I was surprised to see such a reaction from two people who had voted for John Kerry and Al Gore, so I opened with what I assumed was an obvious counterthrust: yes, but at least she’d be better than any of the Republicans…

…both quickly brandished their manly metaphysical shields and said that they would vote for John McCain over Hillary. Like a good little disembodied liberal I strafed them with a laundry list of issues on which McCain is well to the right of Hillary, but they wouldn’t budge. Other than vague and easily dismantled assertions about Hillary's "Big Government" healthcare plan and a small penis suspicion that she might take their guns away, they had nothing of substance, but the conclusion was firm: Hillary was a non-starter and the Democrats were toast if she became the candidate.

Hatred of George W. Bush is often portrayed by mainstream and right-wing pundits, the expansive overlap therein, as a nervous condition, a neuroses, despite Bush's overwhelming stench of illegitimacy and the staggering amount of suffering that he has unleashed, which make his formidable personal inadequacies seem quaint by comparison.

Hillary-haters, on the other hand, often have no beef with any of her policy positions. They simply don’t trust her and never will. After all, she went on tv in a Jackie Kennedy pink suit and defended her husband’s lying about a blowjob. And she said “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas. But what I decided to do was pursue my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life,” a slight to breeders everywhere. And she claps like a Stepford wife. And she's cold. How can you trust someone who doesn't smile enough?

Even as increasing numbers of independent voters support the Democrats on issues that matter, Hillary consistently polls very poorly among men, 34% for and 47% against in a recent New York Times poll. 40% of men in the same poll said they definitely would not vote for her. Undoubtedly this is in part due to double standards. Ambition, seen as “drive” in the case of media-savvy hominids like Rudy Giulani, or as top-notch entertainment when oozed out in buckets by Bill Clinton, in Hillary's case is reduced to cold calculation, which then becomes devious scheming when stirred with misinformation, lack of information, or damning information, however trivial. Hillary is frequently attacked for lacking authenticity, a funny criterion in a profession dominated by world-class shysters. The one relatively sincere president we had in modern times (Jimmy Carter) was run out on a rail in favor of the pathological prevaricator Ronald Reagan, whose wealth of lies and misstatements started a cottage industry of quote books and whose administrations included 138 appointees who stepped down under a cloud.

In America's political rules, if you’re going to be a phony, you have to hide the hand that pulls the strings. The recent “pick Hillary’s theme song” contest on YouTube, in which ‘You and I’ by Celine Dion (of Titanic theme song distinction) won, revealed the puppeteer in all its naked vainglory. Worse than the song itself, or the fact that it was previously used in an advertisement for Air Canada, is that the contest (complete with a YouTube victor announcement spoofing the final episode of The Sopranos) was very likely an attempt to appeal to young voters, to appear ‘hip’ and ‘with it.’ The end result is lose-lose: Hillary is saddled with an albatross, one of the most soulless theme songs in presidential campaign history that reminds one of the Clintonian habit of calculating everything down to the smallest detail, even as the Generation Y target audience has long since moved on to the next flavor of the moment.

To anyone who has been awake these past seven years, discussions of public personas and communication styles will sound eerily similar to 2000 + 2004. On cue, Hillary's friends will tell stories of how warm and kind and funny and generous she is behind closed doors…

…and yet, despite a ‘personality gap,’ Hillary maintains a 20-point lead over her nearest competitor, Barack Obama, a lead which grew after the recent Democratic debates. With the amount of money she’s raising, the length of time she’s held her lead, and her fine-tuned campaign machine, pundits are beginning to wonder if Hillary’s nomination is inevitable.

---

As usual in America ’s ADD-numbed media culture, the most important questions are rarely asked. A country led by someone as uniquely incurious, ignorant, incompetent, inarticulate and inadequate as W. isn't exactly a model of meritocracy, but in the hope that we will put this sad chapter behind us and stop being the laughingstock of the civilized world, any worthwhile discussion of the most powerful leadership position in the world should revolve around the experience and values of the candidate in question.

Many on the left would sooner get a colonoscopy with a rusty fish hook than vote for Hillary, due to her unwillingness to admit that she was wrong to support the invasion of Iraq. In addition, she’s pandered to white picket idiocy with tacks to the right on flag burning, video games, and draconian work requirements for welfare recipients, to say nothing of the lucrative union-busting contracts of her top adviser Mark Penn's PR firm, or her support among job outsourcers, lobbyists, and a long list of CEOs, which signal that she won’t be willing to challenge Big business's chokehold on American life.

At the same time, Hillary’s proactive, progressive engagement with public life goes back a long way, to the heady days of 1969, when she wrote her senior thesis on radical activist Saul Alinsky and was the first student to deliver the commencement address at Wellesley University, a passionately activist speech that garnered a 7-minute standing ovation. In 1971, she clerked at the law firm of Bob Treuhaft, a leftist law firm that defended members of the Black Panthers. In 1974 Hillary was a staff attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund and was on the impeachment staff in the last glorious months of Richard Nixon’s downfall. She followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas and married him in 1975, and from 1978 to 1992 (with a two-year interruption after Clinton lost his first battle for re-election), Hillary served 12 years as Bill’s gubernatorial first lady, first adviser, and as a successful educational reformer, which she complemented with a board seat on the Children’s Defense Council.

Most people don’t remember it now, but when the Clintons came to Washington , in 1993, they had an ambitious progressive agenda, much of which they made law with the help of a Democratic Congress. In short order, they won big increases in social services outlays and pissed off the anti-abortion right, the military establishment, gun owners, college loan lenders, ranchers and other natural resource extractors who have long gotten fat on the public dime, the wealthiest 1.4% (who had their taxes raised), tobacco company execs who were forced to take the stand, and many of the other mutant forces who have poisoned American life for so long.

When Bill Clinton made his first official healthcare speeches, toward the end of 1993, 23 Republican senators publicly supported universal healthcare, but as it became clear to the GOP that any bill would help Clinton and the Democrats consolidate their power even further, the Repuglicans joined forces with their friends in the pharmaceutical companies, HMOs and other stealthcare enterprises to launch a successful disinformation campaign that protected industry profits and left over 40 million Americans without health insurance. After the defeat, history was written by the winners, as the healthcare industry's dubious talking points became conventional wisdom, yet it was Hillary who proved most prophetic when she told civic journalist James Fallows: "In fact, many of the problems will only continue to get worse. The problems that middle-class Americans care the most about – like what doctor they can see – will likely become appreciably worse, because many will be forced into managed care over which they have no say. Employers will make those decisions. They will pay more for fewer benefits. How deeply this sinks in and how much it motivates political action, I don’t know.”

As in Arkansas , when Bill Clinton lost his first re-election contest for pushing the envelope too much, the Clintons were humbled by their inability to fundamentally alter the system, so they took on ideological crossdressing to remain 'politically viable.' Bill Clinton played the Republicans like a fiddle in budget battles and vetoed tax cuts for the rich, but sold his soul on Welfare ‘reform,’ Communications ‘reform’ (that opened the gates for Clear Channel to swallow up smaller radio stations), and many other GOP initiatives, as a way of fishing for corporate dollars and selling himself to the public as a safe, centrist ‘New Democrat.’ Bill Clinton’s deals with the devil got him through the 1996 election, but opened the way for Ralph Nader in 2000 and cemented a permanent mistrust of both of the Clintons among many on the left.

---

Though the Clintons share many of the same ideas and advisers, Hillary is not Bill. She was not the peacemaker in a wife-beating alcoholic’s family who just wants everyone to get along. She lacks Bill’s puppy-dog like desire to bring ‘everybody’ (i.e. those legislators in the center, of that moment’s opportunity) together to cut a deal, any deal. We can’t look into their hearts, but we know Hillary has often if not always or necessarily usually taken more radical, committed positions. And were she to win, she’d have a Democratic Congress, so wouldn’t be tempted to sign a series of insidious bills or be labelled an ‘obstructionist.’

The most substantive criticism of Hillary deals with her positions on the fiasco in Iraq. Hillary's unwillingness to own up to tragic errors in judgment is rooted in the knowledge that any such admittance would be used against her should she become the Democratic nominee. Stuck with unpopular positions on most major issues, for years the Republican Party has done everything imaginable to steer national discussions away from adult discussions of how well-served the public is by the policies of Candidate A or Candidate B toward mudfights over the ‘character’ of the respective candidates. This twisted discourse has taken central form in chickenhawk attacks on Democrats, even decorated veterans like George McGovern and John Kerry, as weak on national defense.

Support for the Iraq invasion among John Kerry, John Edwards, and Hillary was based on a gutless assumption that talking sensibly – as opposed to talking tough – about Iraq , a year after 9/11, would be a loser among voters. The gap between Kerry’s early support of the war and the criticisms he made in the 2004 presidential campaign opened him up to devastatingly effective charges of ‘flip-flopping’ that stuck, and Hillary, especially vulnerable as a woman for being suspected of not having the alpha American desire to kick some third world country’s ass every so many years, is willing to risk a loss of support on the left to not be portrayed as just another weak-kneed Democrat. A lack of public regret on Iraq (and Hillary's silly saber-rattling with Barack Obama) maintains the feeling among voters that Hillary is strong and unwavering, of a stiff upper lip cast that helped Margaret Thatcher break the glass ceiling in Great Britain. If public focus shifts from Hillary's personality, her Republican opponent would be forced to talk about our future, not a welcome strategic option for a party with much explaining to do for the vast human wreckage that trails in its wake.

Hillary isn’t my first, second, or third (if Al Gore returns to the fray) choice, but if she becomes the Democratic candidate, we better hope to hell that she wins. The alternatives to Hillary's right go from scary to scarier to downright Freddy frightening. There’s John McCain, who fittingly spent last April Fool's Day demonstrating the soundness of Bush's troop surge by strutting before the cameras in a Baghdad market while (unbeknownst to the public) "protected by more than a hundred American soldiers, three Black Hawk helicopters, two Apache gunships and a bulletproof vest." Next, we have Mitt Romney, a 9/11-justified-the-invasion-of Iraq mentality Mormon, born-again pro-lifer, and immigrant-basher. Most spine-chilling of all is Rudy Giulani, a fascistic control freak who combines a penchant for Rovian smear tactics with a Big Apple energy that won't quit.

The next president will pick the circuit and appellate judges who decide 90% of the cases that come to court, and Supreme Court justices, which is no small thing when the most liberal justice, 87-year old John Paul Stevens, is hanging on for his (and the nation’s) life hoping for a Democratic president. In the latest Supreme Court term, there were nineteen 5-4 rulings, of which an unlucky thirteen went to Antonin Scalia & Family, including a recent case that undercut fifty years of efforts to integrate schools. If Stevens retires or dies under a Republican president, we can kiss Roe v. Wade goodbye, as well as environmental, labor and consumer protections, civil rights and civil liberties, separation of church and state, regulation of campaign financing, laws governing open and accountable government, and every other forward-thinking public priority imaginable.

---

Politics ain’t patty-cake.

John Edwards is making wonderful populist sounds, and has a great wife, and high likeability numbers, and Obama is a truly gifted speaker with pitch-perfect themes and the most potential to really change the tone in D.C., but both are babes on the political battlefield next to the Clintons, who have sustained fifteen years of hellfire and damnation from the two-headed Republican media monster of financial parasites and pseudo-religious primitives. Those who claim that Hillary can't win forget that the Clintons can play this game. In 1991, it was widely assumed that George Bush Sr. would easily win a second term, but Bill Clinton’s operation, with its rapid responses to all attacks and dogged insistence on repeating simple and straightforward messages ("change," "it's the economy, stupid"), toppled the ruthless and 'unbeatable' GOP presidential machine, even while taking the high road with policy prescriptions for what ailed us.

The current Clinton machine, led by Hillary's long-time, loyal female staff, is equally strong, and currently the odds-on bet to win the Democratic nomination, in no small part because Hillary polls well among women, who made up 54% of the electorate in the 2004. A good portion of that 54%, certainly more than half, would appreciate Hillary's unique ability to shake up the good ol' boy's network. As Laura Liswood (of the White House Project) told the Nation: [Hillary would] “change the whole memory scan of young people, in terms of…what leaders look like.” Perhaps after a few years in office, Hillary could even get the corporate media to stop regularly using words like “calculating,” “ambitious,” and “opportunistic” to describe a female politician following in the unremarked steps of every male president ever.

Those on the left who will not support Hillary in the general election with a claim to vote their heart, and not their head, invoke a false dichotomy. Little on the world scale could be worse for the soul than the events of the last seven years, and the argument that presidential elections are of negligible importance in peoples' lives belongs on the asheaps of the dead and decomposing bodies in Iraq, finely ground and blown to dust. No matter who the major party candidates are, we will undoubtedly be left with two substantially different decision trees. At this precarious moment in American history, after another four years of Republican misrule we may as well change our national slogan to "Got Democracy?"

SHARE: DIGG

Yes, but-

Comments (0 posted):

Post your comment

Please enter the code you see in the image: