Steve Benen worked in the Bill Clinton White House, and still speaks very favorably about the Clintons. He tentatively backed Obama, but he's hardly been anti-Clinton. Now he's pretty much broken with HRC as a result of her efforts to delegitimize Barack Obama's nomination. So has Governor Paterson of New York (sorta). I can't say I'm surprised.
Look, Hillary Clinton isn't an evil woman. But she's complicated and driven by negative energy in a way that no public figure has since Richard Nixon. I think there's a part of her that wants to be the gracious statesman and bow out. We've seen that on occasion, like when she defended Barack Obama on the negotiating with Iran front. I believe that was sincere, and there have been times (like that debate right before the Texas and Ohio primaries) when she's been charming, gracious, and likable, and has appeared to accept Obama's inevitability and her responsibility to the Democratic Party. This is the Clinton who has shown admirable grit in the face of adversity, who has been able to laugh off insults, who has shined at debates and on television for months. This is the Clinton that her supporters see, and love, and want to be president.
That Clinton exists, but there's another Hillary Clinton. The one who tried to suppress voter turnout in Nevada in Obama-friendly areas. The one whose top aides actively distributed nasty smears about Barack Obama's "Muslimness." This Clinton reopened old wounds by having Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan exploit age-old gender disputes at her request. This Clinton declined to disown unquestionably racist comments from her husband and Geraldine Ferraro and qualified her answer to a question about whether Obama was a Muslim to say that he wasn't, but only to the best of her knowledge. The Clinton whose official campaign said that John Kerry was "dead to her" for supporting Barack Obama, and said that Bill Richardson was a "Judas" for not following the unwritten eternal debt he had to the Clintons. This is the Clinton who has advanced gas-tax hooey, who changed her metrics for the nomination several dozen times and, to top it off, has gone about trying to say that she deserves the nomination, even though she lost fair and square, because the rules didn't favor her. This is not the act of an historic statesman (stateswoman?) but the act of a petulant child whining over losing a little league game because the other team cheated. They must have. She was better, she should have won, therefore the other team must have cheated. She simply cannot accept that she was outplayed. This is the Clinton that her opponents (myself included) see when we look at her.
So, which one is true? Well, they both are. Kinda. I think Clinton has a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing going on, in some respects. Mickey Kaus has proposed his theory of "mutnemom" which speculates that Clinton is endearing as an underdog (i.e., she adopts personality A) but after a big win she becomes insufferably cocky once again, which leads to personality B. I think it's more sophisticated than that, though Clinton's wins in West Virginia and Kentucky could account for personality B resurfacing, so Kaus's theory seems still valid. I think that there is a battle going on within her soul. I think that she consciously wants to do the right thing by the party--that's personality A. But I think she's fighting her nature, which is very much convinced of the righteousness of her cause and has no need to justify anything in the pursuit of power and (in her mind) greatly deserved adulation. I see it as being like trying to walk an out-of-control dog. She might be able to restrain the dog for a while, pull on its leash, shout at it to stop, and it will, for a while. Then it will start going again and it will pull her along as it bounds ahead, out of control. I just knew, after she lost NC and almost lost Indiana, when all the pundits said that she was going to launch a positive, Huckabee-like campaign, that it wasn't going to happen. For a while, maybe, but it's just not her nature to take defeats like this. She had to endure one humiliation after another for decades at the hands of her Caligula-like husband (and I think it an apt comparison, although minus the disembowelings). How many times did she have to play the doting wife when another bimbo came forward to accuse Bill of adultery? How many times did she have to sign off on sliming those "other women?" She put up with all that shit only to lose the reward, the one thing she'd been waiting for, to some freshman senator from Illinois? I understand that. Hell, I'd be pretty pissed off, too. And I understand why her supporters back her--all of this is an unstated but central premise of her campaign.
But the presidency is not a therapy session, and putting dysfunctional people in the White House is just not a very good idea. We tried it with Nixon, and he imposed his own sense of class resentment, anti-authoritarian rage, and utter lack of character upon the nation. Do we really want an America that comes to reflect Clinton's own particular resentments? There's already evidence that she views this contest as equivalent to Bill's impeachment. If she somehow wins she's going to extract payback, you better believe it. Just ask Bill Richardson if the Clintons forgive and forget if they think they've been crossed. And now they're trying to grab the nomination from Barack Obama--the greatest natural politician since, well, her husband--and they're willing to exacerbate the already existing wounds in the Democratic Party to do so. It doesn't seem like the side effect of this--Obama losing to McCain in November--is a bug in this plan, but rather a feature. Why else would you compare Barack Obama to Robert Mugabe, unless you think that there's something there? This, truly, is pathetic, and enough is enough. It is no longer sufficient for the party to just "let this thing play out." They need to start to actively push Senator Clinton out of the contest. Such an action will be divisive. It will engender bitterness in some quarters. But a critical point has been reached and the costs of leaving her in the race to continue to pummel Barack Obama are too great. Clinton cannot be trusted to just step aside of her own volition. Even if she wants to on a conscious level she will not be able to overcome this dark, dare I say Nixonian, energy. Nixon never could. Despite all her candidacy has meant for so many people, it has long since ceased to be constructive and its purpose seems now to be as a stalking horse for John McCain's fall campaign, creating and reinforcing narratives and preconceptions that will hurt Obama's chances in the fall. She has chosen to do this rather than exit after Wisconsin, or after North Carolina and Indiana, or after Oregon. If she stays, she will only hurt the Democrats' chances in November, which is exactly why her biggest boosters these days are Fox News and the rest of the right wing "press." They're not going easy on Clinton because they think she's easier to beat, regardless of what Karl Rove says. I often operate according to the assumption of counter-Rove opinion, anyway.
The day is done, and Clinton's supporters can take from the experience what they want. But it is her conduct for the duration of this campaign that has been disgraceful, and anyone who would dismiss these comments is delusional. It was often said, with respect to communism, that out of intelligence, personal honesty, and loyalty to the regime, one could only possess two of the three qualities. At this point, I'd settle for a Clinton campaign that permitted just one.
