A blogger calls for Clinton to withdraw from the race. Heh. But here’s one reason:
If Hillary Clinton wins, her success will become a lesson in how women should achieve power: marry well; put up with any humiliations your husband throws at you, and then, maybe, if you fight dirty, and ask your husband to run your campaign, you might be able to ride his coattails to your “own” political success.
The damage she has done to feminism endures.
Bill Clinton’s Davos-attending fans have had a nasty surprise these past two weeks.
Cheektowaga, New York, 9 pm.
The saddest thing about this campaign in some ways is how it has exposed the fallacy of the idea that Hillary Clinton had emerged from her husband’s shadow and was presenting herself as an individual candidate, fighting on her own merits and for her own self. Gail Collins had a must-read this morning. Money quote:
The implicit promise of Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy was that she had learned from Clinton I. In her, Americans would have a candidate who had been in the very center of White House decision-making. And the very fact that so much had gone wrong was added value. She is nothing if not a good learner, and — the story went — she had discovered at great price where all the landmines lay, both in the presidency and her own character. And she had forged a separate political identity in seven years in the Senate. During an era when the challenges to a new president could be sudden and overwhelming — and here Hillary isn’t ashamed to play the terror card — she was uniquely prepared to hit the ground running and achieve the greatest do-over in American history.
Now, Bill’s role as Chief Attack Dog undermines all that. If he’s all over her campaign, he’s going to be all over her administration. Instead of the original promise of the thoroughly educated Hillary, we’re being offered the worst-case scenario — that the pair of them are going to return to Pennsylvania Avenue and recreate the old Clinton chaos.
Dynasties and psycho-dramas go together. And the times are too dangerous to roll the dice on this dysfunctional couple as the world’s joint leaders again. With 300 million Americans, we really have to reward someone who has already had eight years in the White House with eight more years? To replicate the same patterns?
"It’s not a question of transcending partisanship. It’s a question of fulfilling it," – Sidney Blumenthal, the scorched earth partisan who is inseparable from the Clintons. No wonder the Clintons find Obama so repellent a figure. He is their nemesis.
He sees what he wants to see.
A disgusted liberal pro-choicer switches from Clinton to Obama.
Fight back, Barack. This is a start.
It’s about honesty:
The [Clintons’] ad takes one line from an Obama interview — "The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years" — and juxtaposes it with GOP policies that Obama has never advocated.
"Really?" a voice-over says. "Aren’t those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we’re in today? Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street. Running up a $9 trillion debt. Refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis. Are those the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about?"
The Clinton campaign argued that it was simply quoting Obama. But in the original context, Obama was describing the dominance of Republican ideas in the 1980s and 1990s, without saying he supported them, and asserting that those ideas are of no use today.
Yesterday was revealing for me. The blog had a post linked on AOL’s Welcome screen page – and I received hundreds of emails from people I don’t normally read and who often don’t read blogs that are as consumed with daily politics as the Dish. And what I heard overwhelmingly was a very simple message: We remember the 1990s fondly; we associate them with the Clinton family; it would be great to restore the family who last took care of us so well.
This very basic association – especially among loyal, working-class and middle class Democrats – is what the Clintons are appealing to. What they convey is simple competence and practicality. And they are definitely, wittingly or not, appealing to a more primitive style of dynastic politics, more associated with places like Pakistan and Argentina than the US. They figured that this was all they’d need. It’s their party, after all.
The Obama phenomenon rattled them, and their strategy is to quash it, by any means and at any cost. They know that they do not need to win so much as they need to make Obama lose. That’s the game-plan. The same emailers seemed unusually convinced that Obama was a closet Muslim and that a black man could never be elected in America. The most depressing tendencies from the right and from the left.
The more I witness this campaign, the clearer it is to me that it is not only important that Obama and McCain now win; it is a moral and political imperative that the Clintons lose.
(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)
The chart above shows the remarkable polling similarities in John McCain’s recent primary successes. After a slow decline, at some point late last year, voters sensed he really was their best bet on character, policies and viability. And so the battle now is really one between the worst base instincts of both parties and their most promising candidates for the general election. It’s about the defensive figures of the past defending their turf and power against their own parties redefining themselves for the center. I’m hoping McCain and Obama manage to defeat these forces of entropy. A McCain-Obama fight could be as tough as it would be civil and extremely helpful in providing a mandate for a course of action in Iraq.
In fact, the stronger McCain gets, the clearer it is that he represents an opportunity to move past the bitter, angry elements in today’s GOP – elements that have made it very difficult to give a positive case for conservatism’s merits as a governing philosophy. On spending, immigration, climate change and torture, he is the reform candidate – a chance to turn the page on the unconservative spending insanity, climate denialism and detainee indecency that have scarred conservatism’s reputation under Bush and Cheney and Gonzales And Yoo.
No, I don’t agree with McCain on everything. But if it’s a choice between him and Limbaugh, there really is no contest. McCain makes all the right people on the right angry. McCain represents a chance to remake the GOP on reformist lines, just as Obama represents a chance for the Democrats to escape the sleaze and cynicism of the Clintons. Maybe the Republicans, unlike, it appears, the Democrats, have the courage to choose the future over the past, to break a dynasty rather than entrench one. I sure hope they do.
The Dish 