|
ONE DOWN, TWO TO GO
Well, it looks like it's the end of the road for Hillary. Time
for her to pack up her pantsuits and go back to ... wherever it
is she's pretending to be living these days. Now we just have to
get rid of the other two. Perhaps if I endorse Obama ...
This week, Bill Clinton lost his second presidential election
for a protege.
Ronald Reagan was so popular, he not only won a 49-state
landslide re-election for himself, but he also won a symbolic
third term for his boob of a vice president, George Herbert
Walker Bush (who immediately blew it by breaking his own "no new
taxes" pledge).
By contrast, in addition to not being able to get half the
country to vote for him in two tries, Clinton's connection to any
other presidential candidate spells utter doom. Both his vice
president and his wife have been defeated in elections they
should have won, but lost because of their unfortunate
association with him. The country has spoken. It wants to be rid
of the Clintons.
The reason two elections in recent history -- the 2000
presidential election and the 2008 Democratic primary -- were
razor-close is that in both cases there was some strange,
foreboding, otherworldly force dragging down the presumptive
winner.
Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, lost an election that
should have been his in a walk. In fact, he was the first
incumbent president or vice president in 100 years to lose an
election in peacetime with a good economy. Mind you, that was
before we even knew that Gore was a deranged conspiracy theorist
who believes the Earth is in serious peril from cow
flatulence.
What was the mystery factor to explain such a historic
loss?
The media's pollsters may have lied to the public about
Clinton's vaunted popularity, but Gore's pollsters got paid not
to lie to him. And they told Gore the truth: Clinton was killing
him.
After the election, Gore pollster -- and erstwhile Clinton
pollster -- Stanley Greenberg told Vanity Fair magazine that if
Clinton had helped, he said he would have "had Bill Clinton carry
Al Gore around on his back." (This was when one man could still
actually carry Al Gore on his back.) But research showed that
whenever Clinton was mentioned, Gore's numbers went down faster
than -- oh, never mind.
Steve Rosenthal, political director of the AFL-CIO, also
blamed Clinton for Gore's loss, saying polls showed that voters
who cared about character voted for Bush. (I know, I know. Are
there actually people who care about character and vote
Democrat? Yes, apparently they exist.)
Poor Gore did everything he could to distance himself from
Clinton, publicly criticizing Clinton's sexual exploits with an
intern, refusing to allow Clinton to campaign with him and taking
as his vice president Joe Lieberman -- the first Democratic
senator to scathingly denounce Clinton's antics with Lewinsky
from the Senate floor.
But voters couldn't forget Gore's boss, the purple-faced
lecher. Continued... |