Thinking over last night again, I realized that, for the first time in memory, I actually liked parts of Hillary Clinton’s performance. I liked her unplugged comfort with her own vile hackery. I like her when she’s transparently shameless. I like watching a woman politician tearing into a guy like a rottweiler with issues. It’s the feminist in me.
When she went for Obama over his respect for conservative ideas, she knew it was a phony charge, but she clearly relished wielding it. Ditto the Rezko swipe. And her gob-smackingly brazen lecture about Obama not taking responsibility for his own words – this from Bill Clinton’s wife? And watching her, you could see she was loving it. There was this absolute unconcern for propriety – especially the unconscionably tacky interventions of her husband. There was a relish in small-bore partisan attacks. She is steeped in the old politics, and there’s something clarifying about watching her enjoy flinging the dirt that is now caked under her fingernails.
This was always there, of course. But for a few moments, the patina of bien-pensant benevolence fell off. We didn’t have to endure the trademarked Clinton sacrifice-myself-for-saving-the-world routine. We could appreciate her for the gutter politician she is, deep down, all the way down. The real Clinton is actually more palatable than the Mother Teresa act we have had to deal with in this campaign so far. This is the Clinton who yacks it up with Sidney Blumenthal in her spare time, the Clinton whose main concern with her husband’s sexual pathologies was the damage it might do to her career. I can handle that candidate, even respect her, even as I loathe her. But it won’t last, alas. That’s part of the game. She won’t allow us the pleasure of her own self-awareness for long.
Do I sound like I’m resigning myself to the inevitable? Nah. You’ve got to have hope. The logic for Obama and McCain still outstrips re-electing the Clinton Machine. She’d be terrible for the country and the world in many ways. And the terms on which she is winning this campaign – Bill’s terms – guarantee endless psychodrama and dysfunction in the Oval Office. But at least we now begin to see her and her classless, needy, lying lech of a husband for what they are.
Politicians. The kind who cannot remember any more how painful it was when they had their sense of shame removed.
The Dish 