We’ve got her back
I seem to be the only person out there in the world of local progressive politics who thinks everyone should ease up on the anti-Hillary stuff. Why do I think we need to do this? Because the press will sabotage her. They’ll sabotage Obama too, by repeating lies about him, they’ll sabotage Edwards by making fun of the way he says “mill” (no links for any of that garbage — I’m not giving it more attention than it deserves). But remember — special rules apply to the Clintons. Remember: it’s not okay to ask about George Bush’s coke use but it was a national crisis when Clinton admitted to smoking pot, it’s not okay to call candidates “fake” with no cause, unless that candidate happened to be named Clinton, it’s not okay to call the Bush girls a pair of spoiled, drunken brats, but it is okay to joke that Janet Reno is Chelsea Clinton’s father (as the beloved St. John McCain famously did). The press has no scruples about attacking the Clintons over things they would never attack anyone else for.
It’s why Gore didn’t become president in 2000 — the press dragged Clinton down and, with him, fell Gore (I know he won the popular vote but he should have won by ten points).
If you’re not already, you need to read the Daily Howler for a thorough catalog of all of this. If we don’t have our party members’ backs, the Republicans — and thus, yes, the terrorists — win.
Update: Just to be clear:
1. I think attacking the Bush twins is wrong. I wanted to bring something up that people might say that would be comparable to what was said about Chelsea to bring the point home.
2. By all means, criticize Hillary over her support for the war. It’s why I won’t be voting for her in the primary. But when people go on about how “calculating” and “phony” she is, that’s where I have a problem. Frankly, I don’t like that kind of personalization of candidates in general — I think it’s better to stick to a discussion of policy positions and leadership abilities. But the Clintons take more personal attacks than anyone ever. And that needs to stop.
Second update: Here’s the atrocious Slate piece that took Hillary apart for having the wrong songs on her Ipod. Here’s a bit of it:
You could see the other Clinton making the same sort of calculations this week, when the New York Post put to Hillary the key culturally identifying question of our era: What’s on your iPod? Musical taste is eternally revealing, and thanks to the growing ubiquity of MP3 players, many people now wear this signifying data on their belts. The senator from New York responded that she has the Beatles and the Rolling Stones on the white iPod that her husband gave her for a birthday present, along with Motown and classical music. She then rattled off a list of songs: the Beatles “Hey Jude,” Aretha Franklin’s, “Respect,” the Eagles “Take It to the Limit,” and U2’s “Beautiful Day.”
Hillary Clinton is the least spontaneous of politicians, and this playlist suggests premeditation, if not actual poll-testing.
That’s the context in which the word “fake” is applied to Hillary. And, again, I recommend everyone try reading the Daily Howler every day for a couple weeks to get a better taste of what I’m talking about. I started about two months ago and it’s really opened my eyes.
I totally agree, Exhile. I’m not yet sure who I’m going to go with, and in fact at this moment I would say that I’m leaning against Hillary, but I’m waiting to see how things play out. Wouldn’t it be nice, for once, if the Democrats could avoid turning the nomination fight into a circular firing squad?
In other, more random, news, two documents on the web that might bee of interest to some folks:
Joe Morelle’s prepared testimony before the Comptroller interviewing board:
http://blogs.timesunion.com/capitol/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/Morelle_OSC_Testimony.pdf
Rudy Giuliani’s now-infamous leaked 120-page campaign strategy, in its entirety:
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0107/The_Giuliani_Dossier_A_Brief_Tour.html
interesting reading, both…
and a random plug for a little pet project:
http://allaboutmitt.blogspot.com/
have a good wednesday!
Thanks for the links — glad to see Ben Smith is still kicking ass and taking names now that he’s moved to the Politico.
I agree that there does seem to be a lot of Hillary bashing from the left as of late… I’m in the Obama aisle now, but I’m by no means against Hillary.
My main issue with Hillary was her vote for the war. Granted she’s come out with the “if I knew then what I know now” reversal, but even my uneducated eye knew right along that there were no WMD’s hiding in trucks or being produced with aluminum tubes… As did the vast majority most of the UN when presented with our evidence… Same for Edwards.
If it turns out that she is the nominee after the Primaries, then I’m 100% behind her. I really hope the Primary will be about substantive issues rather than tearing opponents down, but we’ll see how all the candidates play it.
PS… It really isn’t appropriate to call the Bush Twins drunken sluts either. Unlike everyone else you mentioned, they are not professional politicians, and thus shouldn’t have to be held to the same standard of public scrutiny. Just like every other American, they have the right to do whatever they please as long as it doesn’t break the law and I think they’re probably off probation for that underage thing a few years back. I know that’s not how the media works, but it still doesn’t seem fair.
That’s why I said it was wrong! My point was to bring up a comparison with what they said about Chelsea. I actually have no beef with the Bush twins.
Coverage of the Bush twins is appropriate in that they chose to be public figures and their behavior reflects George Bush’s skill and character as a parent. After all, children do what they see their parents doing, regardless of what the parents tell them to do and dysfunctional children are the typical product of dysfunctional parents. Babs-n-Jenna made themselves public figures by attending Bush family photo ops, speaking out in favor of their father (like that ghastly and embarrassing 2004 GOP convention speech), and then acting like vapid party girls. The legitimate subtexts of the Bush twins misbehavior are “If he raised children like that, what’s HE like in private?” and “If he can’t keep his kids in line, how the hell is he supposed to run an entire nation?” Furthermore, when you’ve got the twins acting in illegal and irresponsible ways, it points up the hypocrisy of the whole right-wing “personal responsibility” meme.
By contrast, John Kerry has 2 daughters. They also took the stage when their father accepted his party’s nomination for president and they too were involved in their father’s campaign. The Kerry daughters, however, were sufficiently sane and responsible that they didn’t attract paparazzi attention.
Your position is that members of one party should practice self-censorship to advance the campaign of that party’s prospective nominee? And that self-censorship should only apply to one candidate because she gets special negative attention from the other party?
This is wrong on two counts. First, Hillary is a grown up and can take care of herself. Second, a party nomination process should include a free-ranging debate. Sometimes those debates are harsh. I don’t see how suppressing that debate is healthy for the process.
If that doesn’t convince you, go back in time to Spring 2006 and replace “Hillary” with “Lieberman” to see how well your argument works.
Let me clear: it’s fair to attack her for her position on the war, but I think that attacking her as “fake” and “unelectable” is wrong.
Given that Senator Clinton is one of the 2008 presidential front-runners, she is, by definition, electable. I think that “electable” is actually short-hand for “will she have a coattail effect” for other candidates on the same ticket. So far, the answer to that question seems to be a definite no. The scuttlebutt is that the DNC is having trouble recruiting high quality congressional and senate candidates in the South and Midwest because prospective candidates don’t think that they can win on the same ticket as Hillary because of the galvanizing effect she will have on the Republican base.
The positive things I can say about Ms. Clinton are: She’s got a leather skin when it comes to dealing with media criticism. She’s very patient.
She’s very smart. She’s very ambitious. Not does she not have any skeletons in her closet, any existing skeletons were long ago removed from said closet and autopsied on prime-time TV.
The negative things I can legitimately ascribe to her: Too damned cozy with the DLC. Hasn’t done nearly enough to define herself, as opposed to being defined by the partisan press. Hasn’t been particularly dynamic as a senator. Possibly too beholden to the disastrous council of political consultants such as James Carville.
“Fake” - isn’t that shorthand for too much triangulation? I think it’s definitely worth asking Hillary whether she has a single position that hasn’t been focus grouped to the nth degree. After all, Presidents sometimes have to make quick decisions. Perhaps she’s better suited to be a legislator than an executive. She wouldn’t be the first Senator for whom this is true.
“Electable” - Unless your primary vote is a protest vote, don’t you care if your candidate is able to win the general election? Hillary alone gets a pass on this one?
You’re digging yourself a hole here. Perhaps there’s a grain of truth in the claim that Democrats are too hard on Hillary. But that’s a mighty small foundation upon which to rest your call for self-censorship.
Call her a “triangulator” too — that’s policy, isn’t it? And it’s not about being too hard on her — it’s about not repeating the garbage the media says about her. I don’t call it censorship to ask people not to run around repeating RNC talking points about Democratic candidates.
The whole Hillary isn’t “electable” is based on what? That’s my point. If there’s polls showing her 20 points behind the likely Republican nominee, then it becomes a real issue (she’s not, though). If it’s because David Broder and Tim Russert are saying it, then it’s not.
I don’t think “fake” is short for “triangulator”. It’s short for the media doesn’t like how she dresses or where she filmed her campaign video or what’s on her Ipod. I wish I could tell you I was kidding, but I’m not — she’s been attacked on all three by the media. I’ll find a link for the most egregious — the Ipod one.
If I might, I think what Exile is saying is: let’s not do the Republican’s work for them. In this much, I have to agree. We’ll see plenty of idiots chanting “Flip-flop, flip-flop” at the Republican Convention; indeed, they’re likely to bring actual waffles with them this time (because, ya know, Karl Rove is a political genius), and they certainly don’t need Democrats eating their own to do them serious harm.
At the same time, whining about the double-standards of politics doesn’t get anything done. Democrats rarely have it in them to be as mean as Republicans, which is probably a good thing, and that’s the only reason that double-standard exists. I tend to think that this is largely because the nasty things said about Dems reveal nastier things about Republicans that we don’t usually mention in the media.
For example: “all Democrats are horny little perverts.” Well, OK. Many Dems have earned that slander, whereas Republicans have been less likely to fall for that trap. But doesn’t that just go to prove that most Republicans are too old to be physically capable of getting themselves into the same “positions?” Just so, and when they’re on the Viagra, they’re doing just awful things (Foley). But ya can’t say that on television. That’s just the way it is, and the Republicans know it.
Wow, waffle irons. He is a genius!
And I don’t think whining is the answer either, but I think we can beat the media (not Fox or the Moonie Times but the NYT and the like) down into laying off the idiotic personal attacks on the Clintons somewhat. Personally, I’d rather politics weren’t so personalized in general, but all we can really ask, I’m afraid, is that they not be sniffing the Clintons’ underwear if all they’re going to do with other candidates is go through their garbage cans.
“Electable: can mean that her negatives are too high. It’s not just a head-to-head measure. Yes, sometimes it is bullshit. But, your original argument was that Hillary alone gets a pass on this criticism. I don’t see it. The media is superficial with all candidates, and we should be free to discuss the trivial and the substantial no matter who’s the subject of the discussion.
Plus, I think she invites some of the superficial criticism. For example, how did the media find out the contents of her iPod? I’ll bet they found it out from some Clinton staffer who was fronting a story that “Hillary’s hip to the iPod, just like the kids”. Nothing that comes out of the Clinton camp is accidental. If she leaks the contents of her iPod, then she needs to reap what she’s sown.
Obama smokes cigarettes and lives next door to a mobster, McCain has a temper, Giuliani likes to dress like a girl. They all get the same crap as Hillary. Why does she get a pass? How a candidate responds to criticism tells a lot about them.
McCain’s temper is proof he’s “authentic”, Giluliani’s love for drag proves “he has a sense of humor”, Obama’s smoking habit makes him “intriguingly imperfect” (to quote Maureen Dowd).
The Clintons — both of them — get treated worse than anyone else when it comes to personal matters. Anyone else except possibly Al Gore and John Kerry. But I think even worse than them. The Howler documents this thoroughly. I’m sorry to keep plugging it but it really opened my eyes.
If I may, though, what began all that negative media was the fact that *nothing* ever seemed to stick to the Clintons in the first place. That’s what drove the Conservatives absolutely stark raving mad (and just to see Tony Blankley’s heads explode, it might almost be tempting to vote for Hillie). You couldn’t get anything on them.
Even when Clinton admitted he’d gotten a BJ, most of the country said, “Well, I’m doing OK. Let the man have a BJ or two, he’s doin’ great!” They were the teflon couple.
In fact, to hit on an earlier point, what drove Al Gore down was more about the fact that he chose not to get any help from the Clintons and proceeded to run one of the most misbegotten election campaigns of my lifetime.
I beg to differ on Al Gore. Read this piece.
As for Al Gore. Dude. “Locked Box,” remember? Terrible campaign, looked like a freakin’ school marm. That’s it.
The “lock box” wasn’t the best choice of words. But don’t you wish we had actually treated the surplus as something not to give away in tax cuts for the wealthy.
He could have run a better campaign. But he still won the popular vote despite getting sandbagged by the Beltway press.
Wait, McCain’s got a temper? Pishaw! McCain’s got censure, lest we let the media forget about that. Damned strange how these conversations come together. . . .
Thanks for the link. We actually discussed McCain a bit on the radio show this morning and for me, the main point is that it’s not just that he gets good press relative to Clinton but even moreso relative to Huckabee and Brownback (the _real_ Republicans running for that party’s nomination). It’s not a liberal/conservative thing, it’s a nerdy reporters getting off on kicking it with a cool tough guy (albeit a 73 year-old one).
While we’re on the subject of Walnuts, remember that McCain was the victim of one of the worst smears in recent history in the 2000 SC primary — the allegation that his adopted Bangladeshi daughter (an orphan from one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages) was actually his illegitimate black child.
Hillary has never had to deal with anything close to this.
ref: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/03/21/the_anatomy_of_a_smear_campaign/
That was perpetrated via push polls not through the media.
And have you ever checked out the Clinton Body Count site? Much worse than the McCain push polls.
And somebody (a freaking former New York Times reporter) wrote a book alleging that Chelsea was conceived when Bill raped Hillary one night. How nasty is that?
You’re disputing this statement? At minimum, there was an hour or two roundtable among Clinton advisors before her iPod playlist was released:
Shill #1: “32 Flavors? Well, Ani is a constituent — she lives in Buffalo.”
Shill #2: “But, Ani’s gay, and we don’t want a whisper campaign. We’ve already heard enough rumors about that.”
Shill #1: “So I guess the Indigo Girls have to go?”
Shill #2: “Yep”
Because there’s no way whose husband’s campaign theme song was “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” would actually have “Take It To The Limit” on the Ipod.
You’re going to tell me that without her consultants’ help, it would have been all Nine Inch Nails and the Sex Pistols.
No, all I’m saying is that “Hillary Clinton is the least spontaneous of politicians” is true, and it is the root of the “fake” comment. It’s an issue worth discussing. It may manifest itself in seemingly superficial ways — such as the Slate article you mention — but it resonates deeply with voters, who want their President to have some “genuine” qualities. That’s all. Her iPod is fair game.
The whole thing about authenticity is a shell game run by the media. People — I mean real life people, not the sociopaths who govern our national discourse — loved Bill Clinton when they met him. They all thought he was genuiune. But David Broder and Cokie Roberts and the like thought he was fake.
“Fake” or “geniune” is something best decided by people who have met the candidate or at least watch their speeches on t.v. Voters don’t need the media (or blogs) to tell them whether their candidates are “real” or “fake.” They need us to tell them how the candidates vote, what their plans are, and the like.
Tell me you don’t really think her Ipod is fair game.
Her iPod is fair game because she made it so. She chose to play that game by releasing the contents. She jumped into that meatgrinder -nobody pushed her.
I agree that “fake”/”genuine” is in some ways a media game, but it also reflects a real concern. What’s real about Hillary, and what’s made-to-order? And, if everything’s made-to-order, how can the voter know that the Hillary of 2008 will be the Hillary of 2009?
As for poll-testing, here’s a quote from the Atlantic profile of Nov 06. The Atlantic piece is hardly a hatchet job - I think it’s pretty sympathetic - but it still identifies the same focus-grouping:
ref: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200611/green-hillary
That Josh Green piece in the Atlantic was great. But if the worst we can say about Hillary is that she focus-grouped where to live in NYS and likes to focus on small, doable bills that everyone supports, then maybe I’ll even vote for her in the primary.
You make exactly the right point: how do we know that Hillary of ‘08 will be the Hillary of ‘09? But let me answer that with a question: who on earth could have guessed that the John McCain of 2000 would morph into the John McCain of 2006? To go from Bush-hating, Jerry Falwell-hating outsider to Rove/Dobson lapdog would normally require reincarnation (or at least castration), not just the passage of six years.
So by all means, vote Obama or Edwards because you trust them more (I probably will and for that exact reason). But in a political world where John McCain is seen as the last word in authenticity, Hillary Clinton is hardly fake.
It just occurred to me that John McCain might be a “Manchurian Candidate” in that under severe pressure he caves in to persistent, aggressive ideological forces he encounters on a day-to-day basis. After all, for all that he resisted heroically while he was a prisoner in the Hanoi Hilton, in the end he agreed to denounce fellow prisoners in exchange for special treatment.
Perhaps McCain’s conversion from “independent outsider” to establishment lapdog is genuine due to 6+ years of conservative brainwashing.
In fairness to Hillary, when you’ve lived in the middle of a shit storm for as long as she has, I’d imagine you’re cautious about anything you do in public. Spontaneity is fine if you’ve got the instinct for it (e.g., Bill Clinton), but if you’re not oozing with natural charisma it’s too easy to screw up (e.g., John Kerry’s botched joke last fall, George Bush every time he goes off script).
Your source, please?
I was there - I’m nursing a grudge because my impeccable taste in music was ignored and a bunch of 70’s dreck was used instead.
Actually, I meant it ironically, but obviously it didn’t show up in the discussion.
I think this makes Exile’s point another way. I went at your comment directly, something the “liberal” media fails to do on these kinds of things: to say “I call bullshit,” and give the smack-down to shut the fuck up.
Alternatively, if you’re going to make something up about a candidate to smear them, could you pick one you really despise? … or do you think Hillary is the worst?
[...] since ~ as I recently discussed on RT ~ the Dems aren’t going to have the sack of nuts to go after McCain on this, should he win [...]