Thursday, January 10, 2008

Clinton mania

I am prepared, at this point, to believe that Hillary Clinton's "emotional moment" in New Hampshire was genuine. After all, despite what the right says, she is not a robot from Mars sent to America to destroy our capitalist system. She does not have a history of faking emotional responses, to my knowledge. The morons who asked her to iron their shirts, though, might very well have been Clinton plants, because that sounds like something that Clinton's dark genius Mark Penn might have dreamt up in a fever pitch of inspiration. For those of you who are unaware of who Mark Penn is, allow me to paint a picture for you: picture Karl Rove, the feared, hated, overrated but still quite talented political operative. One wonders what actors might play him in future films--Paul Giamatti, perhaps, or Alan Rickman, for a nice touch of villainous menace. "The Architect" himself would no doubt approve. Now, imagine Karl Rove as played in a major motion picture by Chris Farley (in Tommy Boy mode). That's Mark Penn. He is a largely disrespected, bumbling, curiously right-wing loser who would probably be occupying your city's local Cardboard Box Hotel were it not for the Clintons. His book, Microtrends, was mocked so much by political bloggers that another round of mockery simply does not seem necessary. Suffice it to say that someone who tries to build political coalitions out of aspiring snipers and archery moms cannot be good at what he does.

But Penn makes up for his lack of talent by distancing himself as much as possible from liberalism. He was the one who invented the policy of triangulation for Mr. Presidente Clinton in the 1990's. For those who don't remember, triangulation was based on the "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" school of thought that, while keeping the Democrats in the White House, kept them out of power on Capitol Hill for over a decade. But at least it worked for Bill, so that he could keep signing such great, progressive legislation into law. Without the leadership of Bill Clinton, we would never have seen such atrocities as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the Telecom Act, enormous boondoggles for, respectively, the software and telecommunications industries. Just kidding. Clinton signed both into law. Now, I admit that not too many people care about these laws--aside from the people who, you know, work in those industries and didn't want to see massive amounts of power being taken away from individuals and invested in companies. But that is merely the tip of the iceberg for Bill Clinton, liberal. And Mark Penn was there all along, pushing him to the right. It should be unsurprising that Penn's firm has a union-busting shop, which is precisely what one would expect from a politician of a pro-labor party. If John McCain's top strategist were to have a side business destroying religious right groups, he would become a laughingstock overnight, and his candidacy would be destroyed. And yet the religious right is just as important a constituency to the conservative as organized labor is to the liberal. Something tells me that fighting on both sides of this conflict isn't going to help us win it. If Clinton were to fire this yokel, I would be far more positively inclined toward her campaign.

As it stands, I support Barack Obama partially because I like the guy and think he'd do a good job, but it is mostly because I think he is a really, really good politician and I think that Hillary Clinton is a terrible one. To an extent, both campaigns have become less about the actual ideas that the party holds (one does not sense too much difference between the two on that score) than it has become about whether "it's time" for a woman president. I must confess that I do not understand this. If Hillary were a talented politician, a woman of warmth, humor and inspiration in addition to intellect and toughness, I would support her in a heartbeat. And yet she is deficient in all the traits usually associated with successful politicians. She is not, of course, a self-made individual, just as George W. Bush owed his success to powerful familial connections. Left to her own devices, she would probably never have gone higher than a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives. And yet, here she is.

I am of the opinion that her New Hampshire victory was a fluke, a product of a number of incidents in a compressed time frame that caused women, understandably, to flock to her. These incidents will be forgotten. Will their impact dull with time? I think so. At the end of the day, despite some enhanced empathy from women (and men like myself), the arguments against Hillary's candidacy have not changed. She is still the candidate of the establishment. She is still the one with the hard-wired centrist circuits. She is still the candidate that annoys the right like none other, and the one that can deliver the election to them. One hopes that anger about Chris Matthews's treatment of the Senator of New York will subside and women will once again realize, as they did in Iowa, that she is an impossibly flawed candidate. And yet I do suspect that the mask has been shattered to some extent, and that Clinton will be able to count on women now more than ever before. I readily admit that much of the coverage of Clinton's campaign has been horrifically sexist, but isn't voting based purely out of an emotional, almost maternal instinct to coddle Hillary from those mean reporters just more ammunition to those avowed haters of feminism out there?