Someone wrote a couple of weeks ago wrote:
Before this campaign, Hillary Clinton was at best disliked and distrusted, and at worst hated and despised, by half the country. By the end of this campaign, Hillary Clinton will have spent 150 million dollars to ensure that at least three quarters of the country hates her.
These words are true.
It is perhaps the most accurate description of what the Clintons together have done to their legacy of accomplishment and admiration.
They have destroyed it.
A greater slow moving act of self immolation has never been witnessed.
I, for one, have nearly lost all respect for Bill & Hillary Clinton. Right now, it is incredibly difficult to imagine that I actually endorsed Hillary Clinton for President in the middle of December. My endorsement was short lived, as after Iowa, I was already sufficiently uncomfortable with her tactics to withdraw my support, and soon enough, Obama earned it.
But in four short months, I have gone from believing that Hillary Clinton was the most qualified of our great candidates assembled this cycle to believing that perhaps the right wing paranoia about the Clintons had basis in fact after all. I still struggle with that concept, but the Clintons' tactics during this campaign have forcibly removed whatever rose colored glasses I was wearing. I now see Bill & Hillary in a whole new light, but the picture is not a pretty one. It is a picture of unbridled ambition for power at all cost and narcissism as the guiding, and only, principle of their lives. I do not like that. I do not respect that. And I do not admire it. Indeed, I suffer from whiplash, for two people I once looked up to are two people I now look down upon.
I say all this to point out a simple fact.
Hillary Clinton would not be where she is today if it was not for the passionate support of people like me and others here at Daily Kos. We defended her and her husband against every right wing attack. And because of that defense, the President survived the worst midterm congressional defeat in a half century, endless criminal and congressional investigations, and our nation's second impeachment trial in its history.
If it was not for our support, and the support of Democrats like us across this nation, their much cherished political careers would have ended eleven years ago in embarrassing defeat.
If somehow Hillary Clinton wins the nomination, she should not expect that same support. Many here, and many in the Democratic Party of which she is still apart, including myself, will not support her. Some may still vote for her, but some will not. Enough to ensure her defeat in the fall. And during that campaign, and even if she should somehow, against all odds and logic, win the Presidency, many here and in the Democratic Party will not defend her, even against the silliest right wing attack, because, from our experience during this primary campaign, she has willfully squandered any good will that once existed, and further, many will probably believe that such right wing attacks may now have a basis in truth after all.
For we have now experienced the Clintons for ourselves.
And now we know better.