Yes, But-

Originally posted at getunderground.com on 9/30/2007. Click here for background information.

You know you’re in trouble when the first words in your argument are yes, but.  Last Labor Day after a long day 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.  As soon as Hillary’s name came up they both started with a look and pose that indicated deep, almost unsettling dissatisfaction. 

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

…both said that they would vote for John McCain over Hillary.  I mentioned a litany of issues on which McCain is well to the right of Hillary, and most sensible people, but they wouldn’t budge.  Other than vague and easily dismantled assertions about Hillary’s “Big Government” healthcare plan and a suspicion that she might take their guns away, they had nothing of real weight, but the conclusion was firm:  Hillary was a non-starter and the Democrats may as well throw in the towel if they go with Hillary.

Hatred of George W. Bush is often portrayed by mainstream and right-wing pundits as a nervous condition, a neuroses, despite the overwhelming stench of illegitimacy and the staggering amount of suffering he has unleashed, for decades to come if not longer, which make his vast personal inadequacies seem quaint by comparison.  

Yet in my experience, most water cooler Hillary-haters, those who don’t understandably resent Hillary for her stances on the Iraq War, need or seek little hard evidence to make their case.  They 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’s cold.  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’s the reason we didn’t get universal healthcare, right?    

Even as independent voters increasingly support Democrats on the issues, 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.

Many people find Hillary inauthentic.  The ambition, seen as “drive” when the media refers to media-savvy apemen like Rudy Giulani, or as some of the greatest entertainment on the planet when oozed out in buckets by Bill Clinton, equals calculating, which then becomes scheming when stirred with misinformation, lack of information, or damning information.     

Playing on this theme some months back was a viral spoof of an Apple commercial from 1984 in which a big screen Hillary spoonfeeds poll-tested lines to a throng of drones who are then liberated by a sledgehammer thrown by an Olympian blonde woman.  The ad ends with an Apple insignia in the shape of an "O" for Barack Obama, who represents something fresh, new, unbound to the corporate clowns at the Democratic Leadership Council, ready to change the political landscape.  The implication is that Hillary simply doesn’t have "it," that hard work and high qualifications aren’t enough.  She’s often stiff and serious before the klieg lights; as Ronald Brownstein of the L.A. Times put it, Hillary “excels more at the prose [governing] than the poetry [campaigning] of politics.”

Authenticity would seem a funny criterion in a profession owned by world-class used car salesmen.  The one relatively sincere president we had (Jimmy Carter) was run out on a rail in favor of Ronald Reagan, whose lies and misstatements fill volumes and whose administration included 138 officials who stepped down under a cloud.  If you’re going to be a phony, you have to hide the hand that holds the strings. 

The recent “pick Hillary’s theme song” contest on YouTube showed the puppeteer in all its naked vainglory.  Under the circumstances, it would have made sense to pick quality nominees, even something safe and stale if familiar from classic FM, to ensure that she wouldn’t be stuck with a dud, but somehow "You and I" by Celine Dion (of Titanic theme song fame) won out.  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 with an updated (as of 2004) Alanis Morrissette wannabe.  Hillary is saddled with an albatross which is one of the most soulless theme songs in presidential campaign history, a reminder of the Clintons’ habit of calculating everything down to the smallest detail. A leap of faith is made that most voters won’t question their sincerity, or the abundance of grease easing the transom of their machine. 

To anyone who has been awake these past seven years, these discussions of public personas and communication styles will sound eerily similar to the banal media narratives in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.  On cue, the Democratic candidate’s friends will tell stories of how warm and kind and funny Hillary 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 actually 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, people are beginning to wonder if Hillary’s nomination is inevitable.

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As usual in America’s a.d.d.-numbed media culture, the most important questions are rarely asked.  Not that a country led by someone as uniquely incurious, ignorant, incompetent, inarticulate, and inadequate as George W. Bush can pretend to be a meritocracy, but in the hope that we will put this sad chapter behind us, and stop being the laughingstock of the civilized world, an adult discussion of the most powerful position in the world should include comparisons of experience among the candidates. 

Many on the left would sooner get a colonoscopy with a rusty fish hook than vote for Hillary, due to her support for the invasion of Iraq, and her unwillingness to admit that she was wrong.  She has also pandered to mainstream idiocy with tacks to the right on flag burning and video games, and the union-buster connections of her top adviser and the long list of CEOs supporting her signal that she won’t be willing to challenge big business.

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.  In 1971, she clerked at the law firm of Bob Treuhaft, a leftist firm that defended 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.  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, adviser, and educational reformer which she complemented with a seat on the board of 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.  In short order, they pissed off the anti-abortion right, the military establishment, gun owners, college loan lenders, union-busters, ranchers 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 a very public grilling before Congress, and many of the other mutant forces who have poisoned American life for so long.   

When Bill Clinton first proposed his healthcare reform measure, in September 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,  Republicans launched a disinformation campaign whose false tenets still echo today in the mainstream media chamber.  Hillary pegged the situation exactly in early 1995, after a right-wing surge at the ballot box in 1994 put Republicans in control of Congress:  "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 a little too much, the Clintons were humbled by their inability to fundamentally alter the system, so they took to political crossdressing.  Bill Clinton played the Republicans like a fiddle in budget battles but sold his soul on Welfare "reform," Communications "reform" (that opened the gates for Clear Channel to increase its stranglehold on content and good taste), and many other GOP initiatives, as a way of fishing for corporate dollars and selling himself as a safe, centrist "New Democrat."  Bill Clinton’s crass and destructive moves to the right opened the way for Ralph Nader in 2000 and cemented a permanent mistrust of both of the Clintons among many on the left.

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No matter what you or I or anyone else thinks about Hillary’s true motives, if she becomes the Democratic candidate, we better hope to hell that she wins.  One of the major problems of the two-for-one view of the Clintons as joined at the hip is that it’s a one-size-fits-all model for a dynamic entity.  Hillary is not Bill.  She was not the peacemaker in an alcoholic’s family who just wants everyone to get along.  She lacks Bill’s puppy-dog like desire to bring "everybody" (even disgraceful right-wing Republicans with nothing but ill will) 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 left-leaning positions.  And were she to win, she’d have a Democratic Congress, so she wouldn’t have to face the prospect of vetoing a lot of insidious bills and being portrayed as "obstructionist."

Hillary would pick 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, 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 and the hard-right Republican majority.  If Stevens retires under a Republican president, Roe v. Wade is dead, as is a long list of other progressive causes, including but not limited to environmental, labor and consumer protections, civil rights and civil liberties, separation of church and state, regulation of campaign financing, and laws governing open government.

For years, Republicans have done everything they could to make national discussions about false notions of "character," rather than about how well-served the public is by politician A’s decision or politician B’s.  This distorted discourse has been the go-to ever since the Red Scare of the '50s, and 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 a gutless assumption that talking sensibly – as opposed to talking tough – on 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 down the stretch in the 2004 presidential election opened him up to charges of flip-flopping that stuck, and Hillary, especially vulnerable as a woman for being accused of not having the good ol’ boy American desire to kick some third world country’s ass every so many years, is willing to risk loss of support on the left to not be portrayed as just another weak-kneed Democrat.  A lack of public regret on Iraq is frustrating, but it maintains the feeling among voters that Hillary is strong and unwavering.  In a recent Washington Post/ABC poll of Democrats, Hillary was rated as a “strong” leader by more people than John Edwards and Barack Obama combined. 

Politics ain’t patty-cake.  Those who say that sending Hillary up against the right-wing campaign wrecking machine is like sending a woman into a lion’s den in a porkchop suit forget that the Clintons can play this game.  In 1991, it was broadly assumed that George Bush Sr. would win a second term easily, but Bill Clinton’s operation, with its rapid response to all attacks, firm counterattacks, and simple and steadfast message ("It's the economy, stupid"), toppled the formidable GOP presidential machine.

The things that drive any right-thinking liberal nuts about the Clintons (the schizophrenic ideological turns, the connections to wealthy and sometimes sleazy people, the slick, mechanized operations) are also unfortunately virtual prerequisites to the most powerful position in the world.  John Edwards is making wonderful populist sounds, and has high likability numbers, and Obama is a truly gifted speaker with pitch-perfect themes and the most potential to really change the tone in and from D.C., but both or babes on the political battlefield next to the Clinton, who have sustained fifteen years of hellfire and damnation from the twin-headed Republican media monster of financial parasites and pseudo-religious primitives.   

Hillary would have the weight of history at her back, and an ability to erode double standards.  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 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 presidential nominee ever.     

If you think Hillary is bad news, just look at the alternatives to her right.  There’s John McCain, famous for showing the soundness of the surge by wearing a flak jacket for the cameras in Baghdad while accompanied by 100 fully-armed U.S. marines and 5 Apache helicopters.  From Mormon country, there’s Mitt Romney, whose ideology has gotten a more thorough workover than Jenna Jamison’s danger zone.  Or Rudy Giuliani, whose active fascistic genes combine Cheney’s cleverness with a physical energy that won’t quit.   

Those on the left who claim to vote their heart, and not their head, invoke a false dichotomy, as the argument that presidential elections are of negligible real importance in peoples’ lives belongs on the ash heaps of the dead and decomposed bodies in Iraq, finely ground and blown to dust.  No matter who the Republican nominee is, we will undoubtedly be left with two significantly different decision trees, in which one is far better for humanity despite what we know will be excessive gravitation in both models toward concentrated economic interests that leave democracy straining at the bits.