The New Nixon
Hillary has taken her strategy straight out of Tricky Dick's paranoid, press-bashing playbook
That's the title of Matt Taibbi's latest political screed, just-published in Rolling Stone.
Taibbi's cynical observations on the Nixon vs Kennedy parallels between Hillary and Obama don't spare either candidate, but he shreds Hillary and eviscerates Mark Penn:
Penn is the Democratic version of Karl Rove...his eyes bulge out of his fat, blood-flushed head; his neck spills out of his too-tight shirt collar...
Well, you get the picture (not pretty). More after the jump.
Taibbi, who in my estimation, is one of the most astute (and cynical) political reporters writing for print today, begins his fusillade by calling Penn out on how much he thinks the two candidates have in common:
"So some amorphous thing on leadership and Yucca Mountain are the distinctions between the main Democratic candidates for the presidency?" (Taibbi)
Penn pauses, then smiles. "Those are the distinctions discussed in this debate," he hisses.
Taibbi notes that the "amorphous thing on leadership" roughly corresponds, in terms of rhetorical strategy, to the differences between Kennedy and Nixon. It goes downhill for both candidates, but especially for Hillary, from there:
Her much-reported line about Martin Luther King needing LBJ to complete his "dream" was just another salvo in that effort, a subtle message to the public that the "change" she talks about so incessantly is only legitimate when it comes from the inside.
Taibbi then tells the tale of community organizer Saul Alinsky. Hillary wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley on Alinksy but ultimately disagreed with him because "He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn't."
Ironically, after Alinsky's death, the man who carried on his legacy as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago was none other than Barack Obama, who took a $13,000-a-year gig similar to the one that Hillary turned down.
In summation, Taibbi notes what he sees as the similarities between Hillary's "crying incident" and Nixon's Checkers speech. He doesn't cut her any slack:
After all these years in public life, the only time Hillary Clinton sheds a tear is when her own political career is on the line? I didn't notice her crying when kids started coming home from Fallujah in rubber bags because of a war she voted for.
So, there you have it. Hatchet job or biting commentary? Read the full article online here and make your own mind.