I don’t think it is possible to express adequately how much disdain I have for the Clintons’ dishonesty. We, as a party, suffered mightily for their dishonesty during their time in power. And we defended them because their attackers were ever more dishonest. That is no longer the case. Barack Obama is being as gracious in victory as it is possible to be and his reward is for the Clintons to make intellectually bankrupt arguments that delegitimize the process and harden her supporters against our nominee. We could seat the delegations just as Clinton wants them and Obama would still have more delegates. This isn’t a fight over disenfranchisement, it isn’t a civil rights battle, and it isn’t even a fight over who the nominee will be. It’s just a fight. And only the Clintons have a clue why they’re fighting it.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Sigh. Just make the idiot go away.
Hillary Clinton is a nut case, as is anyone who votes for her at this point.
I think that the notion that it is personal for the Clintons takes us off track.
I think the Clintons are representing DLC interests– corporate interests, the telcos and the HMOs and the drug companies, the corporate world, and the right-wing Lieberman Jewish gang who have always backed the neo-cons, and the neo-cons themselves.
These people have been smearing the Democratic Party and Democratic values for years.
So then it is a life or death fight for the Democratic Party (and the country) with all of the bad actors who keep us from any meaningful reform, those who have all of the power now.
It really makes more sense that this is what the fight is about, rather than about Hillary’s personal ambition.
But because it is hidden, and unstated, it is at once more pernicious, and more evil. It is the big lie all over again. The big lie — WMD are why we invaded Iraq, etc. Never admitting what the truth is — the simple truth. I’d say that is what is going on.
Knock off the anti-Semitism. Jews haven’t always backed neocons. Otherwise, you’re right.
Jewish folks don’t even support the Reps. Last I looked, Obama was winning them 2-to-1 over McCain.
Syolles said right-wing Jews. They do support the neocons.
Pointing that out isn’t an anti-Jewish statement.
I agree completely. Just thinking out loud really.
We need to cut down this meme of Jewish voters not liking Obama, because it’s complete garbage.
Our liberal Jewish friends support Obama for the same reasons we do. Our few conservative Jewish friends are neo-cons. Many powerful Zionist Jews have grabbed the spotlight, but they don’t represent a majority. If I’m wrong, correct me.
No, you’re absolutely right. Like I said, Obama pulls about twice as many Jewish folks as McCain.
My experience is similar. My Jewish friends are all liberals, and they’re all Obama supporters, but that’s probably more of a reflection of region, since there are all of three or four Hillary supporters in NoVa.
From what I’ve gathered from the jews that I know, most jews don’t support the views or positions of the neo-cons. But since many of the neo-cons happen to be jewish, they (the neo-cons) will usually accuse anyone who disagrees with them on anything as being an anti-semite. This causes the rest of us to think the neo-cons carry more jewish support than they actually do. And of course, since no one wants to be accused of being a bigot, it’s a difficult issue to touch.
“This isn’t a fight over disenfranchisement, it isn’t a civil rights battle, and it isn’t even a fight over who the nominee will be. It’s just a fight. And only the Clintons have a clue why they’re fighting it.”
There are several clues why the Clintons continue. It has nothing to do with the Party. It’s all about money, power, money.
And some may disagree but imho there’s the color thingy: resentment deep in their souls. If they can’t succeed, no one else will. Black folks were there to serve, first to get them elected, then as window dressing. In the end black folks defeated them. And that’s the rub. They were out-campaigned by an uppity who wouldn’t wait his turn. So they’ll deny him for as long as they can – by staying in the race – a race that’s over.
If the Clintons really cared about civil rights, vote counts, where were they during December 2000? If they really cared about advancement of Black America -at this point they’d be cheering Obama, not trying to steal his victory.
btw, via Will Bunch, David Gergen is whistling dixie if he thinks Hillary will take the high road
Race has certainly added an additional dimension to the primary, but I believe the Clintons felt entitled and would have savaged anyone who gained traction against them. Whatever group or groups that person represented would have been fair game.
I have come to utterly loathe them.
Her latest -She invokes Zimbabwe as well. Now that’s offensive. All her supporters should defect NOW.
It’s because it’s all they know how to do, and the drive to win is consuming.
It doesn’t matter that the math is against them. It doesn’t matter that public opinion and the MSM is against them. In fact, the more opposed they feel, the more likely they are to keep fighting.
Some people are just wired this way. You see it in sports all the time. No matter how far the team is down, no matter how unlikely victory may seem, these people can see a way where others can’t (and indeed, where sometimes there is no way).
Mrs Clinton has had a few brief moments of clarity and humanity in this campaign, enough to feel a bit sorry for her and certainly enough to keep her supporters fighting for her. It’s sad how she is ending her campaign in smears. It didn’t have to be that way, and it will taint the Clinton legacy among those of us who supported them against the attempted coup by Newt Gingrich.
Part of the problem is Bill. He thinks he knows best, and that nobody else does. It has to be very galling to see an unknown take the prize.
These two are a power couple. Neither is less culpable than the other, They are in it together and always have been. In our family, male and female alike, believe Hillary is the harder of the two. Neither one has any morals.
Jonathan Chait explored this today. Quote is the last few paragraphs of his blog post. Read the whole thing.
It kills me to acknowledge that the people who have always disliked Bill and Hillary had reasons.
Now I do.
She’s reminding me more and more of Bubble Bush every day.
I actually had to admit to a Republican friend of mine that he was right about them the whole time. He didn’t care about Lewinsky or Whitewater or any of that. He told me, “The Clintons are dishonest hacks with no principles or souls.” And he was right.
It’s an important point of agreement we can have with Republicans come the fall cycle. United in disgust at such liars.
I heard Hillary say of Barack, “he didn’t have to take his name off the ballot in Michigan. He chose to do that.”
He HAD to do that to maintain credibility with the party. She didn’t f’ing care.
Jeez, I thought their hackery and wankery was obvious in 1993 when they shoved NAFTA through. That by itself convinced me to sit 1996 out at the top of the ballot.
I’ve never understood the reverence the Clintons (especially Bill) get in the left blogosphere. They were NEVER on our side. EVER. Maybe it’s an age thing, I dunno.
EXACTLY.
I’ve never understood it either.
Well, I was nine years old in 1993, so I wouldn’t have known. The Clinton I grew up knowing was a competent guy who would lie about oral sex (so, on the whole, not bad). NAFTA was sort of out of my universe until about 2003. The Clinton I see now is, along with his wife, an incompetent hack who’ll prey upon the worst in people, and who can’t make an argument without a straw man. It’s sad.
Lacerda,
I’m with you on NAFTA, WTO…you name it.
I protested out in Seattle and couldn’t get back in my hotel because Clinton administration staff were staying there.
I’ve always said that Bill was the best republican president in my lifetime.
It is a combination of factors.
First is this:
I think she’s so convinced of her own morality and historical importance that she can whip herself into a moralistic fervor to support nearly any position that might benefit her, however crass and sleazy. It’s not just that she’s convinced herself it’s okay to try to steal the nomination, she has also appropriated the most sacred legacies of liberalism for her effort to do so.
Second: It’s galling to her to lose what she feels is her destiny and what she feels she is entitled to–ESPECIALLY to a “newcomer,” and a Black one at that! Like idredit said upthread, it’s fine for Black folks to work for them, but to be in charge? Surely, you jest!
Third: The DLC faction thought they had tamped down on all that activism/movement stuff. Part of bringing “change” is changing how the Democratic Party works. Some things, they can’t change: 50 state strategy and party building/organization they can’t mess with as much because it is shown to work and the state chairs like having resources. But there are other ways they want to revert back to form, and now Obama is in the way of all that.
Fourth: I’ll bet it chafes Bill’s backside RAW that Barack Obama has been embraced as the second coming of JFK. That was supposed to be him. Further, the reason Obama’s observation that Bill didn’t change the direction of the country as Reagan did (not for the better, let’s be clear) back in Feb cut to the bone was NOT because they fought his policies. Based on his trade and welfare policies, for example, he showed to be rather enamored of them.
Rather, it’s because Obama basically called him on the fact that while Bill played within the Reaganesque parameters on how to govern, he didn’t change the game. Bill Clinton was the best republican president we’ve ever had, the saying goes. Co-opting some republican issues is not transformational change. It’s accepting the republican framework; even if you play the game better it is still by their rules. Bill didn’t change the game and Bill knows it. Obama can. Bill knows that, too. And it’s killing him.
I truly believe that he doesn’t want any other Democrat to be successful–both so that the DLC can say “See, you have to run this game to win” AND so that he can say that only the Clintons have a lock on winning presidential campaigns.
Given all those factors, Hillary is not just temperamentally unfit for the presidency; she is totally unfit for it. We can’t afford any more unwise policies or family drama played out in the WH. We really, finally, should have had enough.
I don’t think the Clintons are racist. I really don’t. I won’t agree with that argument ever.
But I think they are more than willing to use racism as a tool to slice and divide the party, and for that reason alone, the party should have excommunicated them.
They are not good Democrats, period. I wouldn’t want them anywhere near the oval office ever again.
That’s kind of like saying that a man isn’t a rapist even though he raped a slew of women. Besides, have you ever read this article from the last election cycle about the birth of the DLC? There’s a reason why Appalachia voted en mass for the Clintons…
Interesting article. I cringe when I hear white Democrats talk about “special interest voters,” but that’s what the DLC is all about. So why is anyone surprised that the DLC Clintons have been using racially divisive tactics?
This part made me think about the recent speculation about Appalachian voters and Obama:
They are opportunists and liars and remind us of everything we hate about politics. They use the racism of others.
But they both have a number of very loyal black friends, people who are certainly in a position to recognize and disown a racist. These things are not incompatible.
I think we need a diary to really explore a fuller definition of who is racist. I think a lot of folks think you have to be a Klan member for entry in that club, and you don’t. And at what point does the near-constant use of race-baiting make the baiter a racist? But I’ll leave that alone for the moment.
What I was referring to above was of the Joe Biden variety. This is what I wrote back in January:
THAT is what I meant. I mean, you can go back to that vile Steinem column: it definitely had the ring of “even a Black man will be considered for the presidency before a (white) woman.” I thought she was channeling Vicente Fox.
That’s just one factor among the many that probably disgusts her. But I do believe it is a factor.
AP,
Exactly. I’ve been shocked to learn that some people believe that because they aren’t members of Stormfront, the Klan or committed a hate crime they aren’t racist!
Stunning.
Add this. Selling the environment to corporate America.
And let’s not forget the dot com bubble burst on his watch.
When a Republican gives his constituents some bull we here are not shocked. When Bush and his people lied over and over about Iraq and nukes and Saddam and missiles and democracy and every other piece of crap people in this neck of the blogosphere recognized it for what it was. Maybe not all of us, maybe not immediately, but we knew that Bush wasn’t going into Iraq to prevent nuclear war. He was going in for the oil, and not for our (the American public’s) benefit.
So how come we have such a problem looking at Clinton and not recognizing what she is doing? I knew she’d lost the nomination after Obama reeled off those eleven primaries. Booman can probably put an exact date on it, but we know it was long enough back in the process that much of the drama of the past several months has been unnecessary.
This is not a regular presidential primary race. It is unlike any I can recall in my life (I started paying attention in 1968), and I don’t mean the race and gender issues. Never has one Democrat said that her opponent is not competent to be President BUT THE PRESUMPTIVE Republican candidate is. That, my friends, is political treason. It may not be as much of a shock to recent arrivals what with Joe Lieberman’s antics, but for oldtime Dems this is the most awful behavior for a Democratic candidate. A dead hooker? We can find a workaround. But saying that the opposition’s candidate is better than the guy in the lead?
I like stepping back and looking at a bigger picture (which may explain why I like Obama). When Clinton was President he did a lot of things that hurt working class Americans (I tend to look at things as class issues). The trade deals, the media megamergers, the gutting of welfare, the expansion of the drug war which put so many people in jail and guaranteed lives of poverty. Looking back you can say, gee, it wasn’t so bad back then, and it wasn’t—because the effects of much of what Bill Clinton put in place didn’t bloom fully until Dubya took over. As a union activist I didn’t think Bill was all that good with labor issues at the time although much of it could be blamed on the Contract With America and the Republican seizure of Congress.
So we have a President who behaved in many ways like a Republican, and we have his wife running for President and behaving like a Republican. Even praising the Republican candidate. And the Republican noise machine has been aligned to H. Clinton. My point is that the Clintons aren’t as Democratic as they may appear to be. And if Clinton is doing things to hurt the Democratic Party in November, maybe just maybe she is doing this on purpose.
And actually the Republican-Democrat doesn’t work as well as corporatist/non-corporatist.
Daniel Brandt wrote an essay fifteen years ago about Bill Clinton.
Here: http://www.namebase.org/news01.html
You are so on point here, Bob. So on point.
Especially this:
I have another example–the contracting out of the federal government. I know that may seem like such a niche thing–maybe even dull–and that it only applies to the “coddled” federal workers who “do nothing,” but it really isn’t. It is selling our country to the lowest bidder, who will then jack up your cost in year 2 of your 6-year no-bid contract.
It all started with Reinventing Government which, sadly, was spearheaded by Gore. “Look ma–no federal employees! I’ve shrunk the government!” Balderdash. Citizens still rely on the information/services provided–that doesn’t go away unless there are laws passed to get rid of the info/svcs. The functions just get contracted out. And that only accelerated, under the belief that “the private sector always does it cheaper” when that’s not always the case. You have these inherently governmental functions that are just sold away under the guise that they can do it cheaper and to get out of giving employees decent benefits.
And it opened the door to Shrub’s contracting abuses.
Oh, let us not forget the privatizing of the federal government. Percentage-wise, federal employees are the most unionized portion of the working class, so privatizing is an end run to break the unions. Pisses me off that our national went with Clinton back in January.
As I recall, and feel free to correct me, there was some Clinton deregulation thingie that allowed the Enrons to burst forth. That alone mortally wounded California, destroyed a Dem governor here, gave us Arnold.
Yes, I seem to remember something along those lines, but I’d have to go back and do some research on that.
It’s been a while since I worked on those issues (so I’m a little rusty), but broadly speaking, it’s just astonishing how much waste, fraud and abuse goes on in the name of rooting out “waste, fraud and abuse.” It is giving away our government at fire sale prices, without ANY regard to accountability, oversight, safety–just the appearance of cost savings.
And gutting unions is a nice little benefit, too. So sorry that yours is backing her. I don’t know if this is your union (and not trying to put you out there if it is) but I can’t believe the likes of one in particular…I’m honestly just disgusted with them.
Well, Gray Davis was a DLC Democrat whose fundraising abuses were so outrageous that he should have been primaried out (but no substantial Democrats were willing to take him on). But yes, we have Enron to thank for giving us the Governator.
And she’s coming to my small town Friday. Why? Ugh.
I’m half tempted to go just to see the spectacle, but I don’t know that I’ll be allowed to bring a giant barf bag in with me.
Hope that wasn’t too harsh…
Please go and report back. You don’t have to cheer or clap :>)
I would love to hear an honest report of just what types of people are attending her rallies at this point. Just who are the “dead-enders?” When you watch these things on TV, you only see the people who have been carefully selected by the campaign to be the backdrop. But what “types” are in the audience and how “into it” are these people? So hard to tell.
It finally occurred to me — today — what Hillary Clinton is. She’s a demagogue.
When I read comments posted by her supporters, I often feel pity. They are totally marching to her drumbeat. Hillary is not reality-based. No doubt she, like the Bushies before her, would take this as a compliment: Ordinary people are relity-based, SHE creates her own “reality”. But in order to construct thi parallel universe, she also creates band of — dare I say it? — dittoheads. Because everybody else has already left.
This is classic demagogue territory and in my view, it is the best argument of all for why she should never be president. It is the same MO as the Republicans, that’s why she’s so comfprtable with Limbaugh, Murdoch and Scaife — just a somewhat different constituency, at a time when 28% of Americans think Bush is doing a good job.
I really don’t think America needs another demagogue in the White House.
I think Syolles (above) has it right. What we are seeing here is the corporate wing of the Democratic Party fighting desperately to hang onto control, and Hillary is their point person. They created the DLC for the sake of suppressing the populist urge within the Party, and now they are scared shitless because we the people are on the rise.
Exactly! You said it a lot more compactly than me, though.
I am so fucking sick of the clintons and their defenders.
I am just so. fucking. sick. of. it.
It’s now or never for Hillary, so she’s doing everything that she can to try to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat. If Obama wins in November then she can’t run against him in a primary in 2012 without a severe backlash – she’d lose the presidential primary and then find her Senate primary opponent with $20-30 million cash on-hand and thousands of volunteers from sea to shining sea. If she waits until 2016 then there would be some political heir to President Obama that she’d have to run against and she would be nothing more than the 69 year old senator from New York, two decades removed from the last time that a large swath of the country felt good about a Clinton. Simply put, if she doesn’t win now then she’ll never be president. So why doesn’t she do the right thing and admit that she has no chance of winning now?
Three reasons.
First, and most obviously, if she critically wounds Obama while keeping a significant segment of the Party convinced that her hands are clean (“It’s the misogyny, stupid!”) then she can tell the Party “I told you so!” after the election and become the front-runner for 2012.
Second, there is no carrot for her to abandon her race now. She won’t be the VP nominee and she’s probably not interested in some cabinet position. Harry Reid isn’t about to hand her the Majority Leader’s position and I can’t see her leapfrogging any senator for the chairmanship of any significant committees – even with potential vacancies there are a lot of senators ahead of her in seniority – so what carrot is there to offer her to drop out now?
Third, there is no stick, no punitive action that could be threatened that would make her drop out now. If she chooses to spend the rest of her days as the senator from New York then realistically she could serve from now until Chelsea runs against George P. Bush for president (if we ever actually see that then they’ll find me floating face-down in the Ohio River).
Point being, it’s now or never for Hillary, and nobody has anything to entice her or force her to give up her campaign against Barack Obama. Since she’s grown she can do whatever she damn-well pleases, and in this case, unfortunately, that means doing whatever it takes to be the Democrat who takes the oath of office on January 20, 2009, because right about now a yellow dog could beat John McCain if it were the Democratic nominee.
She snatching defeat from the jaws of victory – our victory.
She’s killing this election cycle.
I hope this is over before June 3. This is just ridiculous.
I think what’s not apparent is how many enemies within the party H. Clinton has made. Everyone’s got to be polite to her even if she’s been divisive, you know for unity’s sake. Not for her but for her voters.
But once this thing is behind, and especially if Obama wins in November, it will get very chilly. Supreme Court judge? Heh heh heh. There will be no one in the DNC who’ll fix parking tickets for her double-parked limo. Majority leader in the Senate? Very, very unlikely after she tried to screw the Demos’ chances this fall.
I heard that Stephanopolos broke a “story” that Obama offered Clinton the VP. Sure, if Stephanopolos is Obama’s foodtaster and human shield for public events.
Kevin Spacey, as quoted on Talk Left:
Huh?
I don’t see why it’s worth counting votes for something that wasn’t a fair contest.
The illogic just fries the mind.
By the way, has anyone fixed Florida’s tendency to not allow black people to vote?