One of the most irritating parts of the whole Democratic primary has been the chortling from the Republican side that the Democrats “have finally come around” on the matter of Hillary Clinton. As if sixteen years of bullshit is somehow vindicated by the exasperations of five months of primary trench warfare.
Listen up, and listen good: the reason the hardcore activist Democrats – the ones who turn out for primaries, the ones who organize caucuses, the beating heart of what political scientists call “the party-in-electorate” – cannot stand Hillary Clinton is twofold:
1) She was insufficiently anti-Republican;
2) In an attempt to grasp for the nomination, she embraced everything the Republicans attacked her with throughout the 90s and after.
Let’s be honest here: nobody who voted for the Iraq War was ever going to pass muster with the resolutely-antiwar Democratic core. John Edwards came closest, and he had to shovel coal hard and fast in the cause of economic populism to build any kind of following, and it was good for a poor third in Iowa. Hillary Clinton was still running her husband’s offense: triangulate, split the difference, and go along with the foe just enough to disarm the avenues of attack. And, as Joe Gibbs painfully learned, what worked like all hell in 1992 isn’t going to get the job done in 2008.
The Clinton offense works from a position of some strength. Even at the height of the Gingrich revolution, Bill Clinton was still President, and still had the power to make himself relevant (as he famously asserted). For the entire decade of the Noughts, the Democrats have basically been without power. They had some control of the Senate for a few months in 2001, but after September 11, they were never going to be anything resembling an opposition. They went along on the war, just as the Clinton offense dictates, in an attempt to take it off the table as an issue. But they got clubbed with it anyway, lost big, and spent four years basically irrelevant to the process. Even after barely regaining control of Congress, the Ds were hamstrung in the Senate by three roadblocks: a feckless majority leader, a minority party willing to shatter the record for filibusters, and a majority that hung on the single vote of the only Likud Senator. With no leverage and no bargaining power, the Democrats couldn’t possibly move the ball with the old Clinton techniques.
For the last seven years, the GOP has actively run over the Democrats like a tractor-trailer over a rooster. Dems have been consistently accused of being Al-Qaeda sympathizers, Sadaam apologists, feckless bong-watered granola-shaver hippie weaklings just dying for a chance to surrender to The Terrorists and submit to some sort of Islamic dictatorship. Hell, their 2004 Presidential candidate’s three Purple Hearts were famously derided as “band-aid injuries” by GOP convention delegates. As a result, a whole lot of Democrats got pissed off beyond recognition, and demanded a candidate for 2008 who would fight back, tooth and claw. And they almost immediately rejected Hillary Clinton as a palatable candidate, because at the critical moments, she hadn’t punched back.
The rest of the story tells itself. Despite her name recognition and early lead, she was outmaneuvered in Iowa – and once a viable “anyone but Hillary” candidate emerged, the activists flocked to him. Even still, she might have held on – but when Obama rattled off a dozen straight wins, she ultimately chose to go into Pennsylvania and embrace the very people and tactics that had been used so viciously against her husband and his administration. The image of Hillary Clinton sitting down with Richard Mellon Scaife – he whose money underwrote the anti-Clinton slime machine for a decade – created the impression that she’d sold her soul to the devil. Her embrace of the Karl Rove school of campaigning clenched it. To borrow Heinrich Böll’s phrase, once she partook of the Host of the Beast, there was no turning back.
If Team Hillary had bothered to work up a Plan B – if they’d plotted beyond Super Tuesday, if they’d made an effort to hit back in the Potomac, if they’d bothered to learn the rules in Texas so as not to lose the state days after the fact – maybe they wouldn’t have been forced into desperation in Pennsylvania. And if they’d been willing to take a chance on the high road, play it straight, keep beating the drum for experience and grinding out the hard work of governance, and stayed clear of buying into the GOP memes about secret Muslims and latte-drinkers and “real Americans”, maybe they could have closed the gap and kept superdelegates in play. As it is, she’s managed to piss off the kind of people who could have been her base, who should have been her base – and who definitely would have been her base, if she hadn’t taken the ball on February 5 and run 180 degrees the wrong way with it.
Ultimately, that’s what drove Democrats away from Hillary Clinton – not that she was inherently some sort of cloven-hooved bitch succubus, because they knew better than that. But she fumbled a sure thing – and in 2008, the one thing the Democrats can’t possibly risk is somebody who could screw up a sure thing. When you’re trying to avoid a plague outbreak, you can’t waste time supporting somebody who’s driving the monkey to the airport.
Hillary’s a great lady, one of the most formidable figures of the day. But that day’s over, and the faithful don’t have the patience to let her rage against the dying of the light any longer.
I swear, I will not post five times a day anymore.
