Wednesday
Nov212007
Why I Don't Support Clinton - Part 3 of 3 - Two Clintons Too Many
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 at 9:13 | baratunde | tagged Hillary Clinton in Hillary Clinton Series, Social-Political
cross-posted to Jack & Jill Politics
This is the third and final installment of my series "Why I Don't Support Clinton." You can read part 1 and part 2 to witness the build-up.
There are many groups that want Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee: the press, Republicans and many on the left who get all hot and bothered at the mere idea that Bill Clinton might even walk past the White House one afternoon and perhaps sign a piece of paper accidentally.
The Press
Don't get it twisted. The press wants Hillary to be president, and not because it's a liberal press but because its a conflict-driven, profit-obsessed, drama-addicted entity that has much more in common with the shameless lowlifes behind TMZ than it does with the integrity of Edward R Murrow. Nothing would sell more papers or gross ratings points than a return of the Clintons to the White House. They could rerun all the scandal footage and theories from the 1990s and double their output with special reports from today.
Hillary thinks she can handle the press scrutiny because she's been through it before. I'm sure she can. What I doubt is America's ability to handle the press scrutiny because we've been through it before, and it was exceptionally ugly and distracting. Also, that was the lite version of what would is likely to greet Hillary a full media-consolidated decade after their last turn at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The 1990s was a terrible time for American politics, divisiveness and the press. I don't want to go through that again.
The GOP
As ever-changing poll results are showing, the Republicans have yet to rally around a frontrunner for president. That's because their frontrunner is Hillary. Mayor 9/11 himself could not motivate as many GOP voters to the polls as could the prospect of voting against Hillary Clinton. Although she represents the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, many on the Right see her as some sort of leftist rebel. Oh, the terrifying stories they will weave about how Hillary-care will force your child to experiment with gay relationships and speak only in Spanish.
If she does get elected, do you think for one second that the Right will allow her to govern? Without controlling Congress, this will be tougher, but all attempts to stop her administration will be made with full force. Charges of a liberal media, swift boat groups and more will come out of the woodwork to make sure absolutely nothing gets done. The Republicans cannot afford to have anything good come of a Clinton administration while Democrats control the House and Senate.
The Left
I asked my Dominican electrician who he wanted for president.
"Hillary Clinton," he said.
"Why?"
"Bill Clinton! Anything to get him back in the White House."
How many other Democrats are thinking this same way? Hillary is merely the vessel getting us our beloved Bill Clinton back. A big part of this series has be debunking the mythology surrounding Clinton. He was not a messiah. He brought us NAFTA, weak progress on energy, incomplete and thus unnecessarily cruel welfare reform, a centrist DLC attitude which had Democrats increasingly sounding like Republicans, abandonment of Rwanda and such a massive lack of sexual self-discipline that he almost got himself kicked out of office. If he's the messiah, I'd hate to meet the anti-Christ.
What On Earth is Bill Clinton's Job?
The Clintons need to stop being coy about Bill Clinton's role in a Hillary White House. Will he be an ambassador to the world, as Hillary has suggested? Great, then that ought to be a lot of fun for her Secretary of State. General policy role? There goes the vice presidential job. It's a classic case of too many cooks in the kitchen, and you don't have to believe me, look at what Al Gore suffered through as he got trampled by Bill and Hillary's outsized ambitions and personalities in the 1990s.
I strongly recommend you read the entire November Vanity Fair article which is a book excerpt from the forthcoming White House Civil War. It provides impressive insight into the White House tensions between the Clintons and the Gores. You had Al competing with Hillary for Bill's attention during the first and part of the second term. And Al's presidential campaign was undermined both by Hillary's selfish Senate run and Bill's damaging infidelity and backstabbing remarks to the press.
A sample:
See what I'm saying? Too many cooks.
People who support Hillary because of her "experience" really need to think about whether we want to relive the "experience" of an unmanageable White House. There is no experience for having two presidents in the White House, living together. It's completely uncharted, and if the rough approximation that is Bill Clinton's White House is any indicator, fraught with counterproductive conflict.
Rather than being focused on making sure we'd continue to have a Democrat in the White House, Bill became obsessed with getting Hillary into the Senate. He pretty openly acknowledged that he owed her for being such a disrespectful, back-stabbing husband. (BTW, to all my ladies on the Left, please stop adoring this man. He's a bad guy when it comes to respect for you. Infidelity is not sexy.)
Gore was in an impossible spot. He could not use Bill that much because Bill was tainted, but he needed Bill's confidence, advice and Democratic fundraising abilities to operate the strongest possible campaign. However, Bill and Hillary were blinded by the idea of a Clinton political legacy. Focusing on her campaign kept them from talking about his sins. Energy that could have gone into Al's campaign was siphoned off into hers. Check this ish out right here!
You see what's happened here? It takes a special flavor of triflinity (yeah, I just made that word up yall!) to poach funds at someone else's fundraiser, especially if that someone is your friend and political teammate. This is that single-minded ambition that throws so many people off. It definitely throws me off. Why? Because all the while, the Clintons are practically ushering George W. Bush into the White House, as if it were no big thing because Hillary would at least get to be a Senator.
Because of their greed and Bill's wayward penis-fueled debt to Hillary, these two put her election to the Senate above Al's election to the presidency. To me this is the greatest error in judgment of both Clintons. Would America have been better off with a President Gore or a Senator Clinton over the past seven years?
The worst case scenario if Hillary didn't get that seat is that half of New York state is represented by a nobody named Rick Lazio. The worst case scenario if Gore didn't win is that all of America is represented by George W. Bush who spends his downtime clearing brush and his office hours launching poorly planned, illegal, preemptive wars which drain the treasury, accelerate an already apocalyptic energy crisis, undermine nearly a decade of civil rights, environmental and safety regulations and forces Americans to pretend they are Canadians when they've scraped together enough worthless dollars to travel abroad.
All the hullabaloo about Hillary's Iraq war vote would be moot, for there would have been no Iraq war under President Gore.
I don't want either of these people running my country again.
This is the third and final installment of my series "Why I Don't Support Clinton." You can read part 1 and part 2 to witness the build-up.
There are many groups that want Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee: the press, Republicans and many on the left who get all hot and bothered at the mere idea that Bill Clinton might even walk past the White House one afternoon and perhaps sign a piece of paper accidentally.
The Press
Don't get it twisted. The press wants Hillary to be president, and not because it's a liberal press but because its a conflict-driven, profit-obsessed, drama-addicted entity that has much more in common with the shameless lowlifes behind TMZ than it does with the integrity of Edward R Murrow. Nothing would sell more papers or gross ratings points than a return of the Clintons to the White House. They could rerun all the scandal footage and theories from the 1990s and double their output with special reports from today.
Hillary thinks she can handle the press scrutiny because she's been through it before. I'm sure she can. What I doubt is America's ability to handle the press scrutiny because we've been through it before, and it was exceptionally ugly and distracting. Also, that was the lite version of what would is likely to greet Hillary a full media-consolidated decade after their last turn at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The 1990s was a terrible time for American politics, divisiveness and the press. I don't want to go through that again.
The GOP
As ever-changing poll results are showing, the Republicans have yet to rally around a frontrunner for president. That's because their frontrunner is Hillary. Mayor 9/11 himself could not motivate as many GOP voters to the polls as could the prospect of voting against Hillary Clinton. Although she represents the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, many on the Right see her as some sort of leftist rebel. Oh, the terrifying stories they will weave about how Hillary-care will force your child to experiment with gay relationships and speak only in Spanish.
If she does get elected, do you think for one second that the Right will allow her to govern? Without controlling Congress, this will be tougher, but all attempts to stop her administration will be made with full force. Charges of a liberal media, swift boat groups and more will come out of the woodwork to make sure absolutely nothing gets done. The Republicans cannot afford to have anything good come of a Clinton administration while Democrats control the House and Senate.
The Left
I asked my Dominican electrician who he wanted for president.
"Hillary Clinton," he said.
"Why?"
"Bill Clinton! Anything to get him back in the White House."
How many other Democrats are thinking this same way? Hillary is merely the vessel getting us our beloved Bill Clinton back. A big part of this series has be debunking the mythology surrounding Clinton. He was not a messiah. He brought us NAFTA, weak progress on energy, incomplete and thus unnecessarily cruel welfare reform, a centrist DLC attitude which had Democrats increasingly sounding like Republicans, abandonment of Rwanda and such a massive lack of sexual self-discipline that he almost got himself kicked out of office. If he's the messiah, I'd hate to meet the anti-Christ.
What On Earth is Bill Clinton's Job?
The Clintons need to stop being coy about Bill Clinton's role in a Hillary White House. Will he be an ambassador to the world, as Hillary has suggested? Great, then that ought to be a lot of fun for her Secretary of State. General policy role? There goes the vice presidential job. It's a classic case of too many cooks in the kitchen, and you don't have to believe me, look at what Al Gore suffered through as he got trampled by Bill and Hillary's outsized ambitions and personalities in the 1990s.
I strongly recommend you read the entire November Vanity Fair article which is a book excerpt from the forthcoming White House Civil War. It provides impressive insight into the White House tensions between the Clintons and the Gores. You had Al competing with Hillary for Bill's attention during the first and part of the second term. And Al's presidential campaign was undermined both by Hillary's selfish Senate run and Bill's damaging infidelity and backstabbing remarks to the press.
A sample:
Gore was the one most affected by Bill's reliance on his wife. It was a given in the White House, as Chief of Staff Mack McLarty said, that everyone would "just have to get used to" the fact that Hillary, along with Bill and Gore, had to "sign off on big decisions." But having what Clinton domestic-policy adviser Bruce Reed called "three forces to be reckoned with" added yet another layer of perplexity and rivalry to the West Wing, where advisers and Cabinet officers knew they could lobby either the First Lady or the vice president to reverse decisions by the president. David Gergen, counselor to the president in 1993 and 1994, called the "three-headed system" a "rolling disaster."
See what I'm saying? Too many cooks.
Yet Hillary always had an undercurrent of competition with Al Gore that burst into the open from time to time. One day, when Gore and his team presented their plans for improving government efficiency, Bill asked so many questions that the meeting ran a half-hour too long. As a result, Bill was late for a session in the White House Residence with Hillary and her health-care advisers. Feeling snubbed, Hillary lectured her husband on the importance of health care. Bill "retreated a bit," recalled a participant. "It took five minutes to get through that situation.… She was not pleased."
People who support Hillary because of her "experience" really need to think about whether we want to relive the "experience" of an unmanageable White House. There is no experience for having two presidents in the White House, living together. It's completely uncharted, and if the rough approximation that is Bill Clinton's White House is any indicator, fraught with counterproductive conflict.
Rather than being focused on making sure we'd continue to have a Democrat in the White House, Bill became obsessed with getting Hillary into the Senate. He pretty openly acknowledged that he owed her for being such a disrespectful, back-stabbing husband. (BTW, to all my ladies on the Left, please stop adoring this man. He's a bad guy when it comes to respect for you. Infidelity is not sexy.)
In his practical and optimistic way, Bill saw the Senate candidacy as a prize for Hillary, a lifeline for him, and a salve for their marriage after her humiliation over his sexual affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which had been sensationally revealed the previous January.
<snip>
As a sitting president, Bill was in a unique position to boost his vice president's candidacy by scheduling White House events to highlight his achievements. But in 1999 those resources were diverted from Gore to Hillary "in a big way," said one member of the Gore team. "The Clintons come first. That was their basic framework." From June through December, Bill and Hillary appeared at 20 events under the aegis of the White House, including a celebration of Hillary's 52nd birthday, where in typical style Bill larded his tribute with statistics on welfare, poverty, crime, and economic growth as he touted his wife as a "genuine visionary" needed by the Senate—the ultimate confluence of the personal and political. During the same period, Gore was featured only at a White House Conference on Mental Health—with Bill, Hillary, and Tipper.
Gore was in an impossible spot. He could not use Bill that much because Bill was tainted, but he needed Bill's confidence, advice and Democratic fundraising abilities to operate the strongest possible campaign. However, Bill and Hillary were blinded by the idea of a Clinton political legacy. Focusing on her campaign kept them from talking about his sins. Energy that could have gone into Al's campaign was siphoned off into hers. Check this ish out right here!
Before Hillary officially established her exploratory committee, she began directly competing with the vice president for money, sometimes even at his own fund-raising events. When Tipper's friend Melinda Blinken and a group of women planned a Gore fund-raiser in Los Angeles, Hillary insisted on being invited—over the objections of the event's organizers. Hillary then shocked the vice president's supporters by soliciting donations for herself in front of Tipper.
You see what's happened here? It takes a special flavor of triflinity (yeah, I just made that word up yall!) to poach funds at someone else's fundraiser, especially if that someone is your friend and political teammate. This is that single-minded ambition that throws so many people off. It definitely throws me off. Why? Because all the while, the Clintons are practically ushering George W. Bush into the White House, as if it were no big thing because Hillary would at least get to be a Senator.
Because of their greed and Bill's wayward penis-fueled debt to Hillary, these two put her election to the Senate above Al's election to the presidency. To me this is the greatest error in judgment of both Clintons. Would America have been better off with a President Gore or a Senator Clinton over the past seven years?
The worst case scenario if Hillary didn't get that seat is that half of New York state is represented by a nobody named Rick Lazio. The worst case scenario if Gore didn't win is that all of America is represented by George W. Bush who spends his downtime clearing brush and his office hours launching poorly planned, illegal, preemptive wars which drain the treasury, accelerate an already apocalyptic energy crisis, undermine nearly a decade of civil rights, environmental and safety regulations and forces Americans to pretend they are Canadians when they've scraped together enough worthless dollars to travel abroad.
All the hullabaloo about Hillary's Iraq war vote would be moot, for there would have been no Iraq war under President Gore.
I don't want either of these people running my country again.
Reader Comments (4)
Hmm.. I don't know how much of this response is that I've drank too much of the Clinton cool-aid but..
Hillary actually has the endorsement of parts of the conservative foreign policy establishment. I've watched C-Span hearings with the Generals and Rumsfeld.. Normally in these hearings the Generals and the secretary of state runs rings around senators, mainly because of the complexity of what's going on.. and because in that level of complexity its easy to manipulate people who don't yet really know what's going on.. And when Hillary started asking the question you could see the Generals and Rumsfeld shaking in there boots. That always impressed me.
The other issue is the strength of the Clinton political machine.. The Republicans, with there Fox News and there Talk Radio have a very powerful public relations machine.. On the democratic side you don't have that.. so its up to each candidate to build a machine that's strong enough to take that on. If there's any reason why I think Kerry lost.. a lot of it seems to come down to this. This and the media environment of the moment..
Anyway.. what I hear is many of the Republican professional activists are in the habit of looking at the Clinton machine with a certain degree of awe. So I think this must figure in there somewhere.
Here's where I think the Clinton cool-aid might be influencing me too much:
It seems to me that a very significant degree of the scandal's surrounding the Clinton's was not actually made by the Clinton's but by Republican smoke machines.. and if you were to buy into this sort of view then it really doesn't matter what Democrat might get into office, there will be lots of smoke. The swift boat shtick ought to illustrate this.
That's not to say Bill's fidelity, or character flaws, are not issues. But I think this gets into a larger series of questions like.. What exactly do we expect from political leaders? Bill's behavior is not exactly abnormal, and that would seem to be why political opinion seemed to sorta cut his way. More deeply, everyone of us has a dark side of the soul.. a part of us that lives in a kind of shadow.. a kind of Freudian unconscious if you will. Our society is not interested in develop whole people after all.. And so we have this issue. On a collective level this is one of our biggest challenges.. the kind of American Immaturity of not being able to wrestle with our own dark side.. The issues surrounding race in America cast a spotlight on this issue.
To create a whole person, believe it or not, requires a little of the dyonesian. There's this notion in Nietzsche of master slave morality.. which perhaps we could transpose into a thinking of morality stratified along social economic lines.. or perhaps having something to do with power. In female dominated primate groups social hierarchy is primarily defined by merit.. where as in male groups there tends to be politically orientated power alliances and intrigues.. Morality in the merit based system is directly related to the needs of that society, and so the social hierarchy is related to your contribution.. When power relationships are playing a chief roll.. then the needs of maintaining the power relationships disturb the equilibrium... so that morality has something to with the needs of power. You can see this playing its self out in a verity of ways with respect to the unfolding story of race. If you can imagine history as a hard science, where we look at the unfolding of events as systemic effects.. then to understand the plot just look at the conflict.. I don't know if I'm making sense here.. but this is my interpretation of the prophetic tradition..
Anyway.. so what I'm saying is Bill Clinton = Funk, at least on a certain level. In the sense that his behavior is basically something that comes out of his shadow side.. his immature side.. his side that is not allowed to be fully whole.. A side that you're not allowed to develop if you want power. If we as a society become more tolerant of human flaws.. then on some level we are creating a situation where people have more of a license to become whole people.
Leaders and Celebrities are, after all, projections of our own inward potential.. on one or another level. So in watching how there lives unfold we are in someways engaged in a collective psychodrama where we, in a strangely democratic sorta way, evolve behavioral norms. In this sense Bill Clintons sexual adventures and there fall out might have actually benefited us...
I don't mean to go on and on and on but..
The other thing is probably no one has done more to damage the Republican party then Karl Rove and Bush since Nixon. I mean Bush and Karl Rove are the people responsible for building up all that kinetic energy in the pendulum that's now swinging in the Democrats position. So I wonder what this means for the over all political climate moving forward..
The secret of so much Republican success seems to be the Gerbils formula: Repeat the lie enough and people will start to believe it. In the Kerry V Bush election you would have political debates that were "he said she said" in such a way that the relative merits of he or she were not considered.. you were equal regardless of merit. And then John Steward participated in the cancelation of Cross Fire.
The Bush political machine started to crumble because Katrina because suddenly it was totally obvious, even to people who weren't paying to close attention, that Bush was full of shit.. and it totally changed the way they were perceived..
I wonder if the internalization of these basic things, by the media, might in someway effect the way news is reported... And if so what would that mean once Hillary, or some other democrat for that matter, came to power?
I mean I'm probably one of the harshest media critics around.. on some level.. I mean I think Chomsky's Manufacturing consent pretty much nails the situation.. I borrow a lot of my politics from Cornell West.. I guess..
Another thing I'll say is I've actually read the auto biographies of Bill and Hillary.. As well as George Stephenopolous.. or however you spell his name.. and Madalline Albright.. And I've read any number of related books as well as the books trashing the Clintons.. And I'm not sure I'm ready to trust the Clintons.. I actually went to a book signing with Bill at the Barns and Noble at the Prudential Mall during the Democratic national convention.. And I got a kind of dark feeling about him.. And I still don't know how to think of that.. And I just don't know...
A lot of what you bring ups is stuff I think you're following a lot more closely then I am.. I could probably recite Clinton PR spin.. But I haven't followed it closely enough to know where the Clinton line breaks down.. which of course has a lot to do with the mechanics of Clinton power.
Right now American Foreign policy seems like one of the big issues. What's up with Iran, what's going on with Puttan, what's are we going to do about Iraq.. And God, what about Pakistan? What about terror? I'm not sure I'm ready to trust the Clinton's with Hati. I mean I guess I think that the definition of "American Interest" ought to somehow be aligned with "Humanities Interest." I mean Henry Kissinger style maintaining the status quo makes no sense in the war on terror situation.
I guess I tend to go with Thomas Barnett's shtick that level of hot spots in any given region is in someway a function of GDP.. So that basically the best way to think of what our job is is as "exporting security" which is a notion that is like.. looking at war in the context of globalization.. But I'm a little more skeptical of the night side of globalization then he or Tom Friedman..
You know.. a big part of it is that ultimately politicians operate pragmatically in the context of political reality.. and the only time anything good ever gets done is when the people actively play a roll in the shaping of those political realities.. I guess that's my hope for this social media space.. that we can leverage it to create the Progressive era 2.0 or something. It kinda seems like this is more important then who gets elected president.
Anyway.. sorry about this crazy long rant in your comments. I'm def feeling more then a little self conscious for it. But ether way I hope it adds something to the conversation.... lol, Hopefully I can avoid showing my face in public for a lil while till it all blows over..
apparently, someone has spiked the clinton cool-aid.....
Sorry but that is distracting... http://www.answers.com/topic/ellipsis
Anyway it's great to see an African American support Barack. Refreshing change.
Lessig can do a better job of showing reasons for support of Barack than I can: http://lessig.org/blog/2007/11/4barack.html
Like Matt I have an impression of Hillary in the Senate:
"And when Hillary started asking the question you could see the Generals and Rumsfeld shaking in there boots. That always impressed me."
Only my impression was 2005 when I see Hillary and Corzine just sitting in the Senate chamber next to one another at some kind of war vote not doing anything. It is just a vision I have that made me angry because there was Hillary Clinton with all the fame, not using it and Jon Corzine who was already elected to governor in NJ, a lame duck Senator also not doing anything.
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