In the past several days we have begun to see the birth of a new and dangerous myth: the myth that Hillary Clinton lost the democratic nomination because of the "sexism" of the media – or maybe of the country, or maybe of the Democratic Party. .
In my view, this theory is a gross canard. I believe, in addition, that the adoption of this theory as an accepted part of the conventional wisdom poses a serious threat to the election of Sen. Obama; for the simple reason that it profoundly undermines the legitimacy of his primary victory.
First of all, let’s tell the truth about why Sen. Clinton lost.
She lost, first of all, because she decided, in a typically Clintonian triangulation move, to vote for the war in Iraq. Apparently in order to "look strong" and to prove that she was not "soft on war;" she voted for a war that had absolutely no legitimacy, a war that may prove to have been the single worst foreign policy decision in the history of America.
That vote was loathsome and despicable. It predisposed millions of Democratic party activists, at a time when Sen. Clinton was generally viewed as a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination, to find a candidate, any candidate, to oppose her.
We were looking for someone else, not because we were opposed to the idea of a woman president, not because we were bigots and vermin, but because of Sen. Clinton’s vote in support of George Bush’s war.
Second, Sen. Clinton not only voted for the war, but over the course of a long and bitter campaign, she refused to repudiate that vote. That meant that Sen. Clinton intentionally and defiantly stood in opposition to the overwhelming majority opinion in her party, on an issue of immense national and international importance.
That meant that the Democrats who opposed the war, men and women, became ever more determined to find "Anyone but Hillary."
As Hillary’s support began to weaken, and as Barack Obama began to seem like a more and more attractive alternative, Hillary turned right –and turned vicious. Her 3 a.m. ad in Ohio seemed to many of us like Karl Rove in drag; it also reminded us of the worse offenses of the administration of Bill Clinton, in which principle was always sacrificed to expediency. (Remember Lani Guinier, Peter Edelman and Sister Soujah? Remember Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? Remember "an end to welfare as we have known it"? )
The Clintons have ALWAYS drawn their support from the right; they have ALWAYS given the left the finger. And they have always made the interest of the Democratic party, and indeed of the country, a distant second to the achievement of their personal ambitions. And that’s just what Hillary did in the last three months of her campaign.
As we all watched with horror, the Clintons turned ever more viciously right, and ever more viciously demagogic. Bill’s red-faced tirades; his calling Obama’s appeal a "fairy tale;" Hillary’s sneering references to Obama’s eloquence; her comments about "hard working people, white people"; her staggeringly offensive reference to Bobby’ Kennedy’s assassination, just as Sen. Kennedy was entering the hospital for an operation on a brain tumor; her virulent, and virulently dishonest, campaign to "let every vote count" in Michigan and Florida; the appalling performance of her spokesman Harold Ickes at the DNC Rules committee hearing, and her encouragement of the shrillest and most poisonous of her supporters to appear at, and disrupt the deliberations of, that committee; most of all, her maniacal refusal to concede to Sen. Obama on the night of the South Dakota and Montana primary –a refusal which Jeffery Toobin properly described as an act of "debauched narcissism" – all of those acts defined a candidate who was totally out of touch with reality, a candidate who was determined to pursue her own personal goals without any regard to the consequences for her party, or indeed for her country.
In the last few months of her campaign, Hillary conducted a campaign which, in terms of sheer aggressiveness towards a fellow democrat has few and perhaps no parallels in the history of Democratic party politics. Indeed not a single day went by when someone on this site or elsewhere on the web, or indeed even in the MSM, did not implore her to end the scorched-earth politics, or point out the tremendous harm her destructive campaign was doing to our potential nominee.
And as we now know, her vicious end-game seriously did wound the Democratic nominee. Her ads and her lacerating comments from that period are already being used by the Republicans to undermine Obama in the general election; today’s NYT tells us that Sen. Obama now finds himself obliged to try to prove that his eloquence is not merely speechifying, but is in fact heart-felt.
And then there were the lies.
I have to pause a minute here, because I am astonished by how little attention has been paid to the fact that Hillary is apparently a pathological liar.
That is, not just a person who "misstates" or "misremembers": we’re talking about a pathological liar; that is, a person who appears to be constitutionally incapable of distinguishing truth from fiction.
How else can one possibly understand the Tuzla incident.
Or to phrase the question differently, can you, Dear Reader, in your wildest imagination, envision yourself standing up in front of an audience and recounting in great detail a story which you have made up out of whole cloth, a story like Hillary’s story about Tuzla?
Many of us have known someone like this, a person who tells lies as easily and automatically as the rest of us easily and automatically tell the truth. Pathological liars are people who are capable of telling you that black is white, and capable of smiling as they say it. They look you straight in the eye and say, believe me, black is white.
Pathological liars are not merely untrustworthy; they are actually frightening, for the reason that they force you to question your own ability to distinguish truth from fiction, reality from fantasy.
That is, when confronted with someone who tells you that something you know to be true to is false, and tells you that lie with a straight face, looking you right in the eye, you necessarily began to question your own perception of reality. You begin to wonder whether black perhaps IS white; that is,whether it is you who is actually crazy.
Can you imagine such a person as President of the United States? Can you imagine having a President whose every word has to be parsed in order to determine what "is" is; and even then, to know that that person is wholly capable of telling a story which he/she has invented out of while cloth, a story that has no relation whatsoever to truth or reality?
To me, Hillary the liar is one of the most terrifying aspects of her dreadful, misguided campaign.
The above elements are the reality of the primary campaign that has just ended. Sen. Clinton’s campaign was characterized by gross arrogance; by intentional, code-worded racism, by defiance of the opinion of the overwhelming opinion of Democrats (and indeed a majority of the country) on the subject of the War in Iraq, by a series of lies, and by the entire litany of political mistakes that have been detailed in these and many other pages, including tens of millions of dollars wasted and misspent, vicious staff in-fighting, appallingly wrong strategic decisions involving the caucuses and super Tuesday, alienation of the Black community and egregious underestimation of the appeal of Sen. Obama.
And now, after her own supporters apparently forced her to pull the plug on this disastrous campaign, we are being informed that Sen. Clinton’s loss was in fact not caused by her vote in support of the war in Iraq, or her lies, or her incompetent campaign, or her racism or her arrogance: her loss was in fact caused by ------ sexism.
It should come as no surprise that Sen. Clinton would try to promulgate this Rovian canard. We have learned over the past months that, much like George Bush, Hillary Clinton is never wrong and never makes a mistake: her problems have always been caused by "the media" or "the elite" or by "the vast right-wing conspiracy." With Hillary, someone else is always to blame.
It may come as no surprise that Hillary would try to foist this canard off on the public: that is true to form. But that the Democratic party would buy into this ludicrous argument is alarming, and to my view, quite dangerous. Because if Hillary was in fact defeated by "sexism" and not by her own viciousness, arrogance and incompetence, then Obama’s nomination is not legitimate. If Hillary was defeated by sexism, of course her legions of angry women supporters are right in denouncing the process, and of course they should refuse to lend their support to a person who won the nomination by a corrupt and illegitimate process.
Frank Rich observes in today’s NYT that a "fictional campaign narrative, once set in the concrete of Beltway bloviation, must be recited incessantly." I fear that just such a fictional campaign narrative in now in the process of being written on the subject of Sen. Clinton’s campaign. Indeed even Howard Dean –a man I greatly admire – has begum to repeat the Beltway cliché that Sen. Clinton’s defeat was at least partially caused by sexism.
In my view, this notion is false from beginning to end. Sen. Clinton lost for the reasons detailed above. Sexism was no more a factor in her defeat than the fact that she kisses babies or that she prefers milk chocolate to bittersweet, or vice versa.
The officials of the Democratic Party owe it to Sen Obama to defend his victory to their last breath; and Sen.Obama himself (who demonstrably has done quite well without the benefit of advice from this quarter) should be careful not to undermine his own legitimacy by suggesting that sexism or any other ignoble prejudice helped him win this race.
Sen. Obama won because he ran a smarter campaign that Sen. Clinton. He won because he abjured personal attacks and behaved like a gentlemen throughout the campaign. He won because he opposed the war from the very beginning.
Let us not, as we reflect on the past few months and the defeat of Sen. Clinton, "drop both the sword and the balance in the transport of a delicious pity." (Samuel Johnson) Sen. Clinton’s defeat was a train-wreck of her own making, and Sen. Obama’s victory was a victory won fair and square, by playing by the rules, by refusing to descend into demagoguery, by refusing to "go negative," by abjuring "sexism" or any other kind of "ism," except hard-work-ism, decent-person-ism and a dazzling display of personal magnet-ism.
Sen. Obama won this nomination honestly, with the support of millions of Americans who believe in his ideas about change, who have been passionately moved by his grace and his eloquence.
Let’s not undermine that victory by giving credence to a lot of hokum about Hillary that can only be properly described as bullshit.