But, bit by bit, she sliced off chunks of her soul. Hillary used to be the
personification of hope for the left. On the welfare debate, she was
supposed to be Bill's conscience. She was the Eleanor to his Franklin.
But now Hillary is the Democrats' establishment candidate, pitted against
the true believer, John Edwards, and the idealist, Obama. Even committed
liberals tell focus groups she's too cold, too calculating.
And how did she get that way? She studied at the feet of the master. Bill
Clinton cast himself as a champion of the "Third Way," a grandiose political
phrase with disturbing intellectual roots. For Bill, it mostly meant that he
could split the difference between any two positions. Any hard choice was a
"false choice." When asked how he'd have voted on the first Persian Gulf
War, he said he agreed with the minority but would have voted with the
majority. He smoked pot but didn't inhale. Monica Lewinsky had sex with him,
but he could swear under oath he didn't have sex with her.
Bill can make those sorts of things work because he really believes them -
or at least he does as the words are coming out of his mouth. Hillary has
nowhere near that sort of skill. She's learned the dance moves and she's
memorized the lyrics, but she can't hear the music. That was evident in the
now-infamous Oct. 30 debate performance during which she said she was both
for and against driver's licenses for illegal immigrants and for and against
pulling troops out of Iraq.
In this race, she's tried to be hawk and dove, idealist and pragmatist,
martyr and hero. But unlike her husband - a jazz impresario of
people-pleasing prevarication - she's a terrible liar. She comes across as
calculated because that's all that's left to her: calculation. Jesse Jackson
once famously said that Bill Clinton had no core beliefs, he was simply
"appetite" all the way down. That appetite seems to have become community
property in the Clinton household, such as it is.
Obama is surging because Democrats want idealism and hope. Hillary has
jettisoned her idealism, and she's filed down her hope to mere yearning.
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