Requiem For Hillary and Bill
Charles Krauthammer reviews the tortured history of Hillary’s ineffective and ever-changing campaign strategy and credits her for finally adopting a winning strategy against Obama, But alas, it proved too little too late
But going left proved disastrous for Clinton. It abolished all significant policy differences between her and Obama, the National Journal’s 2007 most liberal senator. On health care, for example, her attempts to turn a minor difference in the definition of universality into a major assault on Obama fell flat. With no important policy differences separating them, the contest became one of character and personality. Matched against this elegant, intellectually nimble, hugely talented newcomer, she had no chance of winning that contest.
She tried everything. Her charges that he was a man of nothing but words came off as a petulant, envious attack on eloquence. The power to inspire may not be sufficient to qualify for the presidency, but it is hardly a liability.
She tried a silly plagiarism charge, then settled for the experience card. In a change election, this was not a brilliant strategy. It forced her to dwell on the 1990s, playing candidate of the past to Obama’s candidate of the future. Her studied attempts to embellish her experience led her into a thicket of confabulated Bosnian sniper fire.
It wasn’t until late in the fourth quarter that she found the seam in Obama’s defense. In fact, Obama handed her the playbook with Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Michelle Obama’s comments about never having been proud of America and Obama’s own guns-and-God condescension toward small-town whites.
But Hillary overplayed her hand, especially with her gas-tax gimmickry, which most voters were astute enough to recognize it for what it was: more pandering and political expediency from a woman most knew would do anything and say anything to get elected.
And now what? The Wall Street Journal sees the party as in the midst of a painful, but necessary divorce from the Clintons’. It took 10 years, but you might say Democrats have finally voted to impeach. The historical irony of many Democrats’ sudden astonishment of the mores of Bill and Hillary is noted:
More remarkable still, Democrats supporting Mr. Obama had a revelation about Clintonian mores. David Geffen, channeling William Safire, declared that “everybody in politics lies,” but the Clintons “do it with such ease, it’s troubling.” Ted Kennedy was shocked to see the Clintons play the race card in South Carolina. The media discovered their secrecy over tax records and Clinton Foundation donors, while columnists were appalled to hear her assail Mr. Obama for his associations with radical bomber William Ayers. Listen closely and you could almost hear Bob Dole asking, “Where’s the outrage?”
By the time Mrs. Clinton made her famous claim about dodging Bosnian sniper fire, Democrats and their media friends no longer called it a mere gaffe, as they once might have. This time the remark was said to be emblematic of her entire political career. The same folks who had believed her about Whitewater and the rest now claimed she never tells the truth about anything.
As the scales suddenly fell from liberal eyes, the most striking statistic was the one in this week’s North Carolina exit poll. Asked if they considered Mrs. Clinton “honest and trustworthy,” no fewer than 50% of Democratic primary voters said she was not. In Indiana, the figure was merely 45%.
Though she intends to soldier on, party unity be damned, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post thinks Hillary needs to be stopped before her “majestic sense of entitlement” burns the house down along racial lines. A question though for Robinson and other pundits who now find Hillary’s tactics of self-aggrandizement so odious, yet who defended tenaciously the reprehensible character of the Clintons when they occupied the White House: aren’t you former Clinton enablers in part responsible for the havoc the practitioners of the “politics of personal destruction” have now wreaked on the Democratic Party itself? Why should the Clintons now heed calls to cease their slash-and-burn tactics when it served them so well in the past? Also, as loathsome as the Clintons’ race-baiting is, shouldn’t the “post-racial” candidate, the transcendent New Messiah share some of the blame for the racial polarization that now plagues the party?
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