THE MONSTER<\/a><\/p>\nThe Monster: A Loyal Clinton Soldier Turns in His Badge<\/p>\n
Posted March 9, 2008 | 03:37 PM (EST)<\/p>\n
She has no idea.<\/p>\n
She has no idea how many times I defended her. How many right-leaning friends and relatives I battled with. How many times I played down her shady business deals and penchant for scandals — whether it was Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, Cattle Futures, Web Hubbell, or Norman Hsu. She has no idea how frequently I dismissed her husband\u2019s serial adultery as an unfortunate trait of an otherwise brilliant man. For sixteen years, I was a proud soldier in the legion of “Clinton apologists” — who believed that peace and prosperity were more important than regrettable personality traits.<\/p>\n
And then she ran for president.<\/p>\n
After seven years of George W. Bush, America is hungry for change. Big change. And let\u2019s face it — Hillary Clinton, the party standard-bearer and former White House denizen — isn\u2019t it. But even after voters coalesced around Barack Obama, handing him eleven straight primaries (twelve, if you count Vermont), she refused to accept the possibility -though math, money and momentum were clearly against her — that the Bush\/Clinton Family Band might not be #1 on America\u2019s Billboard chart anymore.<\/p>\n
So, rather than step aside and become the hero of her party, she made a strategy decision to go negative in advance of Ohio and Texas. Not just negative — personal. She cynically chided Mr. Obama\u2019s message of hope. She played the victim card. The gender card. The Muslim card. She cried “shame on you, Barack Obama” for his campaign tactics, while (if we\u2019re to believe Matt Drudge) simultaneously floating a picture of him in Somali garb to stir up questions of his patriotism.<\/p>\n
She accused Mr. Obama of his own shady business deals (the irony of which nearly ripped a hole in the fabric of space\/time). She accused him of being two-faced on NAFTA, when it was her campaign that had winked at the Canadians. She demanded that he “reject” the endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, but remained silent when Rush Limbaugh stirred up votes for her in Texas. And she crafted the now-infamous “3am” attack ad — which used scare tactics to highlight Senator Obama\u2019s perceived lack of experience in foreign affairs. Straight out of the ol\u2019 Atwater\/Rove playbook. Of course, all of this paled in comparison to her husband\u2019s patronizing, racially insensitive comments earlier in the primary season.<\/p>\n
Was this the same Hillary Clinton whose husband ran on the idea that hope was more powerful than fear? The wife of a president who had less foreign policy experience than Barack Obama when he was elected? And exactly which crisis is she referring to when she claims to have more experience? And while we\u2019re at it, where the hell are those tax returns?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s clear that Hillary\u2019s back in this thing, at least for the time being. But at what cost? Short of some cataclysmic event, there\u2019s no way either she or Mr. Obama can reach 2,025 delegates in the remaining contests. That means she\u2019s accepted the inevitability of a brokered convention. A convention she\u2019ll almost certainly enter with fewer delegates than her opponent. That raises some important questions:<\/p>\n
Will she subvert the will of the voters? Will she turn Denver into a series of shady back-room deals and arm twisting? Will she dispatch her husband to pressure superdelegates into switching allegiances at the last minute? Are we in for, as one pundit put it, a good ol\u2019 fashioned “knife fight?”<\/p>\n
And if she does manage to secure the nomination, what about the scores of disenfranchised Obama supporters (many of them young people with little loyalty to the Democratic Party)? How will she bring them back into the tent? Hillary seems confident that this can be remedied by offering Mr. Obama a spot on her ticket. Really? And what would his motivation be for accepting? Playing third-fiddle to Bill?<\/p>\n
However, if Mr. Obama goes on to secure the nomination, she\u2019ll have handed his rival a treasure trove of sound bites. All John McCain has to do between August and November is play clips of Hillary questioning Obama\u2019s experience and belittling his platitudes. In a way, she\u2019ll have become Mr. McCain\u2019s second running mate.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s proven that she cares more about “Hillary” than “unity.” More about defeating Obama than defeating the Republicans. She\u2019s become a political suicide-bomber, happy to blow herself to bits — as long as she takes everyone else with her.<\/p>\n
On Friday, one of Barack Obama\u2019s foreign policy advisors, Samantha Power, resigned after calling Senator Clinton “a monster” during an off-the-record exchange. It was an unfortunate slip, but one that echoed the sentiments of many Clinton apologists like me — who\u2019ve watched Hillary\u2019s descent into pettiness and fear-mongering with the heartbreak of a child who grows up to realize that his beloved mother has been a terrible person all along.<\/p>\n
Are the conservatives right about the Clintons? Will they do and say anything to get elected?<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
All I know is…I\u2019m through apologizing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
i started my day with very very fast driving over to riverton to record yet another FABULOUS security bank radio ad. this time i managed to read the copy three times in a row, without mistakes, and the whole thing took only ten minutes. i love doing radio ads. i loved the fact that even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6JLYy-hm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graceuncensored.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}