The most enjoyable aspect of watching the HMS Hillary take on water is the
prospect that Bill - and his cult of personality - will go down with the
ship, too.
Bill Clinton has been stumping for his wife on the Iowa hustings, framing
the election as a referendum on his tenure as president. Last month in
Muscatine (during the same speech in which he falsely claimed to have
opposed the Iraq war from the beginning), he told the assembled Democrats
that HMS Hillary could transport America "back to the future."
Last summer, when he first started hawking Hillary like a door-to-door
salesman, he told a crowd: "I know some people say, ŒLook at them. They're
old. They're sort of yesterday's news.' ...
"Well," Slick Willie said, grinning, "yesterday's news was pretty good."
Indeed, Hillary's entire campaign has been grounded in her experience in the
Clinton administration of the 1990s, even though that experience mostly
involves designing a failed health-care plan and unsuccessfully hectoring
her husband to move to the left. Still, as New York Times editorial writer
Adam Cohen noted in a column last week, it was her decision to make the
choice between her and Barack Obama a "referendum on a decade."
So if Hillary Clinton loses the race for the nomination - heck, even if she
just loses the Iowa caucuses - I hope to see this headline somewhere,
perhaps in the New York Post: "America to Clinton(s): We're Just Not That
Into You."
The rush of schadenfreude would be so overwhelming, the entire Vast
Right-Wing Conspiracy would have to hie itself to its fainting couch. For
years now, the Clintons' defenders have claimed that the '90s were halcyon
days, thanks to the deft statesmanship of the Clintons. Much of the liberal
establishment has become wedded to protecting the memory of the Clintons'
stewardship. David Brock's progressive outfit, Media Matters for America, is
a prime example. It should be renamed "Hillary Matters for America," given
that it is less a media watchdog and more an attack dog for Hillary Clinton.
But schadenfreude doesn't really do justice to Hillary's potential downfall.
Her career is indisputably a product of her marriage. But for most of her
life, Hillary had an independent ideological identity that now seems to have
gone down the memory hole. In her own words, she championed a whole new
"politics of meaning" and sought to redefine "who we are as human beings in
this postmodern age."
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.