I am apparently not the only one who have come to dislike Hillary intensely over the last couple of weeks, as she has proven to be a craven opportunist without any values or loyalties to the Democratic Party or the progressive movement. Today the blogs are filled with counterpunches against Hillary Rove Clinton. Choice quotes:
And I came to the Democratic party prepared to vote for her. When I left the GOP and registered as a Democrat, Hillary was the inevitable nominee. It was the number one question I was asked- "Are you going to vote for Hillary?" I always said yes.
She and her low-brow coterie of lackeys have left a trail of slime and unpaid vendor bills everywhere they have gone the past few months. They have lied, distorted, polled, and then lied some more. They attack viciously, then play the victim when punched back. There is literally NOTHING they will not do to win this nomination. They have convinced themselves and their rabid but diminishing band of followers that she somehow got screwed in Florida and Michigan. They have shit all over every caucus state. They have dismissed every state they have not won as unimportant. They have come up with new names for delegates depending on how useful they are today, and tomorrow they will change their name and corresponding level of importance. Some days they are super delegates. Other days they are automatic delegates. Pledged delegates don’t have to stick with their candidate, we are told, except for Hillary’s who have to stick with her. The only consistent principle is that the only people who matter are the ones who have voted for Hillary. They have threatened, hell, they have promised, a bitter convention fight if the super-delegates do not crown her as the nominee. They bring out the worst in everyone around them, me included.
Not only are average Americans under assault from that LIEBERAL Obama, but from the passive voice, as well. This would merely be stupid and offensive if she actually believed that Obama doesn’t like or looks down on average Americans, but she knows that isn’t true. As it is, though, it is far more than offensive and stupid, as she just thinks she has an angle where she can score some political points. Dutifully and methodically, in an effort to save us from ourselves, she seeks out the nearest microphone and with robotic and unemotional precision invokes San Francisco and gets in on some of that class warfare loving the Republicans have used so well in the past few elections. Make sure you wear gloves when you stick the knife in, and do it firmly and dispassionately. Otherwise you might get some blood on yourself.
The woman is a moral black hole- soulless, empty, calculating and nasty all the way to her core (I know, I know- I just don’t know the "real" Hillary, who is charming and friendly and down to earth and likes pizza and beer). While her super-human ambition is admirable, it is not grounded in a sense of decency, and she knows no boundaries. Watching her the past few days has been a real eye opener, and watching her campaign the past few months should be a clear enough indication what America has to look forward to if she should win the election (although, I simply can not conceive how that happens). While she runs around lying about Obama, allowing her surrogates to portray him as unelectable, she fails to mention how she is going to win the general election when she can not even convince a majority of her own party to choose her.
Hillary Clinton, adopting the frames, lies, stereotypes and destructive clichés long embraced by the likes of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. She has clearly decided that the road to victory runs through scorched earth.
The question is, if she succeeds, what kind of Party will she be left to lead? She's burning down the village to save it -- or to prove that she would make the best fire chief. But the village won't be saved; only one house will be left standing. A house with room for just two occupants. Hill and Bill.
Clinton's cynical distortion of Obama's remarks is in keeping with her campaign's modus operandi. On the foreign policy front, we've been fed a steady diet of her RNC-patented attacks: No Democrat can be trusted with national security -- except her. Obama hasn't crossed the threshold to be commander-in-chief. Etc.
Now she's turned to the domestic policy section of the RNC playbook, twisting Obama's words in a way that confirms every right-wing demagogic caricature of her own Party.
Yes, as Obama himself admits, he certainly could have chosen his words more artfully. Perhaps he should have borrowed Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign riff about "economically insecure white people who are scared to death." Maybe "scared to death" is less "elitist" than "bitter." But telling the truth, however inartfully, makes you "out of touch"? Give. Me. A. Break.
It has been an article of faith in the Democratic Party over the last twenty years that when small town, working class whites vote for Republicans they're voting against their economic self-interest. And why do they do that? Because every four years the Republican Party comes into those small towns and, to distract folks from the worsening economic situation, trots out a bunch of divisive, hot button social issues: "Let's not talk about why you don't have a job, can't afford health care, or can't send your kids to college; let's talk about gay marriage, school prayer, illegal immigration, and flag burning amendments." And Hillary is following the blueprint.
John McCain may as well take the next six months off, raise some money, maybe take a vacation -- because Hillary Clinton is out there doing his work for him.
If Clinton's Rovian stoop-to-anything tactics succeed -- not at beating Obama but at making him an easier target for McCain -- the price will be paid by the very small-town Americans she is now pandering to. Americans already banished to economic oblivion by the same cynical tactics she's employing will be rewarded with four more years of downward economic mobility.
This is far too crude even for Karl Rove. It is a parody of a brutal Rove ad. Without batting an eyelid, Clinton effortlessly adopts the entire worldview of the most cynical of Republican operatives and applies it with the delicacy of a shovel to the likely Democratic party nominee. This is a) how desperate she must know feel; b) how utterly irrelevant it is to her what happens in this election unless she is the next Democratic nominee for president.
Simply put: how could the person who approved this ad and the argument it represents logically vote for Barack Obama over John McCain this fall? If it is an Obama-McCain race, how would that person not feel vindicated if Obama lost? In fact, making Obama lose is now manifestly the prime objective of the Clintons. There is no other plausible interpretation of their recent actions, statements and behavior. I find this pretty gob-smacking as an observer; but if I were a Democrat?
Now answer this question: do you believe that the Clintons actually believe that Obama is an effete, ineffectual elitist piece of roadkill for John McCain ... but still somehow impossible to beat by the rules of the Democratic primary system? Or do they think he's better than that? Are they cynics or narcissists? Or, as anyone with an eye and the stomach can see, some horribly perfect combination of the two?
This ad and Clinton's insistence on personally making this argument again and again in the baldest ad hominem ways in a state critical to Democratic hopes this fall should remove any illusions anyone has about the core character of the junior senator from New York. The best gloss is that her own vanity has genuinely persuaded her that she and she alone could possibly beat John McCain. The worst is that after decades of hardball politicking, she and her husband have become completely indistinguishable from the forces that first tried to destroy them.
Will Hillary finally stop using right wing language, stop being a complete phoney mouthing poll tested right wing compatible platitudes, start acting like a Democrat and show some principles or even dignity? Don't hold your breath.
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