After months of huffing and puffing to blow down the House of Obama and without inflicting the damage she intended, Hillary has at last achieved something. The House of Obama is still standing, but some of the shutters are down and more will fall, if we fall for any more tricks.
There has been a shift over the weekend, you see it in hundreds of comments and in blogs, on political sites, in articles by journalists and editors published on Real Clear Politics. All of a sudden, Hillary should stay in the race. It's only democracy, the democratic way, that she does. We have been unfair. She has every right. Obama doesn't have the 2024 he needs to win, any more than she does. Howard Dean himself was dumbfounded when Leahy asked her to get out. This thing must run its course, all the way to Denver if necessary. Every vote counts, that's what America is about. What's the matter with everyone, we are democrats!
In the last week, Hillary has used every basic principle of democracy to justify her staying in and to condemn those who want her out. All kinds of interviews on television, statements at rallies, take your pick.
Hillary's sudden yearning for democratic fairness, is what started this small but ever growing movement, built on, it would seem, guilt. Guilt over how unfair we've been, how undemocratic we've been. How very naughty we've been! Over the weekend and in her interview with the Washington Post*, she did the most brilliant thing. She played the make-them-feel guilty card, and not just that, but guilty over being...undemocratic! Having apparently decided that the personal attacks on Obama aren't working that well, including the innuendos, she and Bill have opted for a cleaner strategy: appeal to the democrat in them. Use anything and everything that defines democracy itself, that dog should hunt!
And some of us have fallen for it, more and more are falling for it, I include myself. Up until last evening, that is, when I went for a good stiff walk up the fell. Windy up there, good oxygen, you can see all the way to Scotland. Lambs, too, just born and nursing, snow-white with pitch-black faces. After about ten minutes, though, the lovely quiet---a brief respite from the wind---was broken by my sudden and quite loud, "Damn you, Hillary!" It startled a female sheep and her twins, and they fled. I, too, felt like fleeing, fleeing my own gullibility.
No wonder Obama said, on Saturday in Johnstown, PA, ""My attitude is that Senator Clinton can run as long as she wants. She is a fierce and formidable opponent, and she obviously believes she would make the best nominee and the best president."* (The second sentence was unnecessary, just gen-gen (gentlemanly generosity) that Hillary will not thank him for, or even understand. She is too ruthless a fighter herself to be grateful for compliments from the other side. If anything, she will have contempt for such gen-gen, thinking he lacks what it takes to win.) What choice did he have, other than to say she should fight on? Everything she said in the Washington Post interview was designed to appeal to our sense of democracy, to reminding our wicked selves that Obama was no closer to the 2024 delegates needed than she is. And her "I know there are some people who want to shut this down and I think they are wrong," and her "General elections start where there is a nominee or a putative nominee...they think they have theirs, we don't yet have ours. . . .", was to appeal to our sense of democratic-type fairness. And her ""I am committed to competing everywhere that there is an election," is along the same lines as the other statements she made: designed to remind us that, after all, if there is an election---in this case a primary---and you are a candidate, you do have the right to participate! In a democracy, anyway!
What can anyone do about this latest tack of Hillary's, supposing someone would like to do something about it? Answer: nothing much. One thing we can do is not go overboard on the guilt thing, and not jump on the bandwagon just because everyone else is, lest we be seen as undemocratic. Hillary isn't doing this out of love or respect for democracy. She is the most undemocratic democrat I've ever seen. This is the woman who openly, to the voters, prefers the GOP candidate to a fellow democrat, Obama. This is the woman that Bill, her chief surrogate, pairs up with the GOP candidate as a pair that loves America and is devoted to its interests, no mention of Obama joining that ever-so-patriotic pair. Must we put up with this and have to back her too? Answer: No; there is a way out, it depends on what you believe or don't believe about Hillary.
Before that, though, something about Hillary and Richard Scaife, and here it is:**
Hillary conducted an interview with the editorial board of right-wing media baron Richard Mellon Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, with Dick Scaife himself sitting right next to her, and she used the occasion to bring up the Obama-Wright controversy and otherwise to cozy up to a man, as I put it last week, who took it upon himself to spend much of the ’90s trying to destroy the Clintons and who has spent the past several decades trying to destroy liberalism and the Democratic Party.
A Scaife endorsement would be telling — which is to say, it would say a lot about Hillary, about what she has become. Based on this column, after all, an endorsement would be a genuinely positive call, not a hesitant, reluctant pick of the lesser of two evils. Put another way, it would be pro-Clinton, which is what Scaife now seems to be. Should not Democrats be concerned that a leading right-wing media baron is firmly in Hillary’s camp?
Either way, though, Hillary is cozying up to the vast right-wing conspiracy of which she herself has been a target. Indeed, either way, are we not right to question Hillary’s judgment? Either she now appeals to Scaife, in which case there is cause for concern, or she is allowing herself to be played by Scaife, in which case there is cause for concern of a different kind.
Either way, she has lost perspective. Either way, it is all about herself. Either way, there is no way she should be the Democratic nominee for president.
To be fair, Obama himself will have an interview with Scaife. However, Scaife didn't spend years trying to destroy Obama. If Hillary really believes that Scaife authored the 'vast right-wing conspiracy' against her and Bill, how could she even sit down with him? She is way ahead in Pennsylvania, surely she could have declined an interview with this man. For me, there is something unseemly about Hillary chatting merrily away with someone she has loathed for years and years, it is hard to watch. Yes, in politics you have to grant interviews to people you don't like, but this goes beyond dislike, and, as far as the Pennsylvania primary goes, it was unnecessary.
In any case, I agree with the conclusion in the above quote, though for more reasons than the Scaife thing. She got many of us feeling guilty about wanting her to just get out, and then pulled this stunt with Scaife, after the stunt she pulled when preferring McCain to Obama. Even if she hadn't, there is something really distasteful about a person who seems to have so little respect or even interest in, our party, using our pride in our party principles to get us off her back.
In my view, she isn't a democrat. What she is is a woman using our party to attain the presidency. Opportunism at its worst, if I am right. And because that is why I want her out, I don't have to fall for her latest ploy. I did for a couple of days, I can't say why, for I don't know. Were she a democrat, I'd have to, even if I didn't like her personally. I don't believe she is one, and as long as I believe that, I can want her out of this dash for the nomination, a hundred times a day, and not be undemocratic in the least. True or false, we act on our beliefs. Here, the stress is on this: we must never act against our beliefs. And many, along with me, believe that Hillary is not a true democrat or even a democrat at all. On that one belief, we are not obligated to support her staying in this race. On the contrary.
I don't deny that some of her supporters are hurt that she isn't doing well, there was a good diary on this, here at Kos, about a week ago. I don't even deny that Hillary is hurt. But that diary said that Obama had won, therefore, no need to pile on Hillary anymore. I don't believe he has won, rather, I hope he will win. In the meantime, I will speak up when I believe we are being used by this woman. I know she would love us to think that any further criticism of her, is piling on. That she will use the victim thing to silence the voters and even get their vote, seems true.
Obama, whom I support, is not perfect, as some of his supporters seem to believe. He is far from perfect. He has flaws and he has made mistakes. And he is young---though not as inexperienced in comparison to Hillary, as Hillary makes out. She has minimized his experience and, we now know, embellished her own. Of the two candidates left in this battle for the nomination, I believe, and you may not, that he is the only democrat. The only one, and a true one.
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* http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
** http://themoderatevoice.com/...
Note to readers. For those of you who don't like my source on the Hillary-Scaife matter, just click Real Clear Politics, or google 'Google News', or anything you like, there are plenty more.