May 8, 2008, Destroying the Village Party to Save It?
You know, I believe I have a certain familiarity with Hillary Clinton's personality insofar as she is 15 years older than I, to the day... we Scorpios are often maniacally loyal (think about why she stays with Bill) and maniacally driven (I've completed 18 marathons, despite a complete lack of physical talent, and I continue to write my blog, week in, week out, six and a half years on, despite a lack of particular literary talent or tremendous popularity among blog-readers, while Sen. Clinton continues to run for President, despite an obvious lack of political talent or popularity among voters).
There: I said it. She doesn't GET that her husband has more talent in his one little wagging finger than she has in her whole body (and Mark Penn's too). She became my fair state's junior senator solely on the strength of her famous husband. She somehow thought that being an otherwise underachieving back-bench senator and Bill's wife qualified her not only to run for President, but to win her party's nomination by acclimation. This led her to run a cynical and vapid campaign that just assumed that the nation's Democratic voters would be as forgiving and fawning over she and her famous husband's as New York voters were (in her decisive victories over political heavyweights Rick Lazio and John Spencer). Like George W. Bush, a man also in his current job because of a famous relative, Hillary actually believed that this nomination was hers, without having to earn it with actual voters. Which is why, presumably, she may well be living in a bubble where she actually believes that the battle for the Democratic nomination isn't over.
And let's talk about "35 years of experience". The thing is, Sen. Clinton's own experience is actually quite interesting, and quite unique, and in its own way, quite compelling. Something tells me there weren't many women attorneys working on the Watergate investigation committee, or at the Rose Law firm, where she was a partner for many years. The fact is, being a law partner (in the Deep South, no less) among legal and corporate barracudas is actually pretty good experience in its own right for a prospective commander in chief. And she could take credit for "participating" in the Bill Clinton Administration, though admit that not accomplishing anything on health care (other than costing her own party Congress) "was one of those humbling experiences that make me understand the system like no one else". And of course, being First Lady of a state and of the nation, and serving as a Senator from a fawning state which doesn't demand that she actually do anything. But she didn't run on her own record: she ran on Bill's (perhaps he's paying for all this).
And we might forget that, on policy, Sen. Clinton has hardly made friends among traditional Democratic primary voters. Among other things, she voted for the Iraq war, and as to legislative achievements, the only major bill her name has ever been attached to remains "Bill CLINTON".
All of this serves as my wind-up for Sen. Clinton's unbelievably blunt and downright racist statements conveyed in her USA Today interview, to wit:
"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.""There's a pattern emerging here," she said.
A pattern indeed: that of a spoil-sport loser now clearly willing to destroy her own party to satisfy her own ambition. The point has been made by others of just how outrageous it is for her to ostensibly write off Blacks and college graduates (Sen. Obama, as both is presumably doubly written off), so I won't go there. I will simply repeat a point I have seen made by others: she is now asking the
working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, Democrats in West Virginia and Kentucky, states where Democrats have a shot in the fall, to get used to voting against their own nominee because he's a Black man.
And, perhaps, in the year 2008, enough Americans really do still have sufficient racism in their hearts so that they can't bring themselves to vote for a Black man, any Black man, even one with a White mother, raised by his White grandparents, who attended private schools including an Ivy League College and attained the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, to the point where that Black man can't win a Presidential election. And that may well be a sad fact of life.
But to hear that kind of sentiment from the mouth of a candidate for President from the Democratic Party (let alone the wife of "America's First Black President" and someone running to the "the first" __ president herself) is just something none of us should abide. Period. I fervently hope-- no, I demand, that the remaining super-delegates get off their duffs and take this away from this party-destroying race-baiter immediately, before Sen. Clinton achieves her goal of ultimate burning her own party's nominee with her "if I can't have it no one can" sentiment.
There. I said that too.