Appetite All The Way Down
Jonah Goldberg looks at the leaks that have sprung in "HMS Hillary" and hopes that it means that the infamous Clinton triangulation has come full circle, like a torpedo that circles back and sinks the vessel that launched it. The title of this post comes from a line once delivered by Jesse Jackson about Bill Clinton, that Bill had no core beliefs, only appetite. Goldberg says that Clinton may have absorbed all of those lessons from her husband, but she can't pull it off successfully.
So if Hillary Clinton loses the race for the nomination — heck, even if she just loses the Iowa caucuses — I hope to see this headline somewhere, perhaps in the New York Post: "America to Clinton(s): We're Just Not That Into You."
The rush of schadenfreude would be so overwhelming, the entire Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy would have to hie itself to its fainting couch. For years now, the Clintons' defenders have claimed that the '90s were halcyon days, thanks to the deft statesmanship of the Clintons. Much of the liberal establishment has become wedded to protecting the memory of the Clintons' stewardship. David Brock's progressive outfit, Media Matters for America, is a prime example. It should be renamed "Hillary Matters for America," given that it is less a media watchdog and more an attack dog for Hillary Clinton.
But schadenfreude doesn't really do justice to Hillary's potential downfall. Her career is indisputably a product of her marriage. But for most of her life, Hillary had an independent ideological identity that now seems to have gone down the memory hole. In her own words, she championed a whole new "politics of meaning" and sought to redefine "who we are as human beings in this postmodern age."
But, bit by bit, she sliced off chunks of her soul. Hillary used to be the personification of hope for the left. On the welfare debate, she was supposed to be Bill's conscience. She was the Eleanor to his Franklin.
But now Hillary is the Democrats' establishment candidate, pitted against the true believer, John Edwards, and the idealist, Obama. Even committed liberals tell focus groups she's too cold, too calculating.
I pointed out that even dedicated Democrats just plain do not like Hillary Clinton and they do not trust her. They see the blatant pandering, the shapeshifting of Clinton's "beliefs" depending on her audience and come to the conclusion that she is simply too calculating, too icy in her blind ambition. She is clumsy in her use of slime attacks and they seems to come back and hurt her worse than the intended targets. If the HMS Hillary does disappear into a sort of Bermuda Triangualtion, there would be a wave of schadenfreude, indeed. And it might finally be enough to put the Clinton years behind us.
By martian, Wednesday, 19 December , 2007 @ 3:18 pm
We can only hope!