Like many of Willa Cather’s great tales, the protagonist in this one seemed from the first inherently fraught with inauthenticity and destined for failure by an original misconception. The heartland girl from John Wesley’s choir on the Great Plains who went back east with innocence and naivety to the Big House in New York and even sought the Presidency. This one could end likewise as Cather’s stories often do. How often the things from the Pastures of Plenty come in with the dust, as Woody Guthrie expressed it, and then so suddenly are gone with the wind. But maybe this one should end with a law suit.
Jonathan Chait, editor of the "The New Republic" and a Bill Clinton liberal, got to the center of the issue in a LA Times essay last week:
The Hillary Clinton campaign is a product of the fact that her husband can’t run for re-election. She is certainly highly intelligent and qualified to hold the Presidency, but if her husband were running, she wouldn’t be. People react to her candidacy largely on the basis of how they felt about Bill Clinton.
No doubt. As we vividly remember, as soon as Elvis entered the building, the missus emerged as co-manager. As they so coyly put it back then, we were getting "two for one."
Bush would probably be dumped unceremoniously in 2008 [if only he could run again], says Chiat, and only our "kooky current system lets him [Bush] retire undefeated [by Bill Clinton]."
What this country really needs is to have Bill Clinton run against George W. Bush,
he says.
As it is with Chairman Mao and Peter the Great, they hope to extend his legacy and extend his career by sending his charming wife to the Oval Office. Obviously, it is a way of circumventing those pesky Republicans who changed the law just to block Franklin Roosevelt out of reelection.
Laws are laws. If we don’t like them, we can change them. But to circumvent them by sending a spouse to office, so as to govern behind her skirt is worse than illegal – it is bad faith. It is monarchist in tendency and attempts to circumvent the common tradition of political faith and fairness we have established in this country since 1776.
If Constitutional issues are blocking the will of the American people, let’s be straight and consider fixing them. Of course, it would be a political expedient simply to enable the Bill Faithful who see Elvis One as a kind of generational deity, but so was the original law that now blocks his reelection a political expediency.
And while we’re at it, let’s review again why Arnold Schwarzenegger, the highly regarded Governor of California, who was just reelected in a small landslide, can’t run. Foreign born, outlawed by the Constitution. The LA Times, always vigilant, recently wrote about this as well. They say it had something to do with Poland during the Revolution and Napoleon. I can’t remember exactly, but it sounded like more of that partisan bickering of which the Founding Fathers are so noted for. They recommend changing the Constitution so Arnold can run.
Maybe we could have a quick Constitutional Convention so that Bill can run against Arnold.
No? Then how about this. Why doesn’t the savvy, intelligent and formidable wife of the Governator, Maria Shriver, of the famed Kennedy clan, run in Arnold’s place, like the missus is doing for Bill? There would be a kind of native fairness and equity to it. It would be an extra-legal solution for clearing a path around a bunch of archaic legal knotholes and it wouldn’t be technically illegal. And just like with the Clintons, we’d be getting "two for one." And a Kennedy and an Arnold! The White House would be awash with grace, intelligence and élan like we haven’t seen since Jackie Kennedy hosted the likes of Andre Malraux and a gaggle of other writers, artists and Nobel laureates. I’m sure the Arnolds know lots of nice people.
As Chait says, politics since Bill Clinton has consisted largely of referendum-by-proxy on Bill Clinton.
But here is something else: The drafting of Arnold in mid-stream was also a referendum on contentious Clinton partisan politics and Clinton proxies, like Gray Davis. Toward the end of his ill-fated half term, California was paralyzed by partisan gridlock and its economy was being compared to the economy of Venezuela. It was about to tank. Governor Schwarzenegger retrieved California not only from weak-management, but from the same bitter political warfare that plagues the rest of the country today.
Schwarzenegger was reelected by a wide margin just recently by showing agile and responsive leadership. He is willing to change course when the set course fails. He calls himself a "post-partisan" politician. He is part libertarian, part liberal, part conservative.
Visiting us up here in New Hampshire this past week Senator Clinton made the same point again and again. The headline in the NYTs today reads: "Clinton Reminds New Hampshire: I’m with Bill." She attempted to "tap his magic" at nearly every turn, it reports. She mentioned him eight times on Saturday and said in reference to the Republicans,
Bill and I have beaten them before, and we will again.
It’s that "two for one" thing. But Chait is wrong. This country doesn’t need George W. Bush to run against Bill Clinton. The Bushes are a spent force and so are the Clintons. California is the awakening American vision. The Governator has sent the old schools of both parties into remission with a superior new political model that has not yet been brought to a national election.
The country needs Arnold Schwarzenegger to run against Bill Clinton. That would put us on path into the new century. But as the Constitution forbids it for both candidates, let’s run a proxy race between Mrs. Arnold Schwarzenegger against Mrs. Bill Clinton.