The joke is no laughing matter
from The Sunday Telegraph, June 5th 2005
Like almost everything about the Clintons, it started as a joke and somehow turned real. Hillary Rodham Clinton running for President wasn't a bad gag: she's widely believed to be consumed by ambition; her husband, her chosen vessel these past several decades, was a spent force, politically if not in the DNA fabric-analysis sense; and it was unlikely that she'd become Senator for New York in order to spend the next couple of decades attending to the complaints of whiny losers in upstate welfare backwaters.
For many on the right, the faux warnings about a Rodhamite restoration in the White House were a way of prolonging the turbulent passions of the Clinton years in a relatively harmless way - like playing Civil War re-enactments on a Saturday afternoon, it offered the frisson of the great primal conflict with none of the pain. After all, the idea of Hillary becoming President is patently absurd, isn't it?
Yes, it is - as absurd as a woman who's never run for elected office and who polls showed was one of the most passionately loathed on the political scene becoming senator of a state she's never lived in. Just because something's absurd doesn't mean it can't happen.
So here we are trembling on the brink of the early positioning for the 2008 nomination, and suddenly Hillary, if not exactly a shoo-in, is looking like the least worst choice for the Democratic Party. Right now, she's "officially'' focused on getting re-elected to the Senate next year, but any serious threat to that prospect (Rudy Giuliani, say) fades with every month. The real energy's being concentrated on the White House run.
I'd say President Rodham Clinton is a better-than-evens probability, mainly because of the rule promulgated by my own senator, Bob Smith of New Hampshire, after her husband's impeachment trial. "He's won,'' said Senator Smith, a Republican, after dutifully casting his vote to nail Slick Willie's puffy butt. "He always wins. Let's move on.''
The Clintons always win but they never move on. The distinguishing characteristic (as Paula Jones would say) of the Clintons' Democratic Party is that it was swell for the Clintons, disastrous for the Democratic Party: throughout the 1990s, the Democrats lost everything - Congress, state legislatures, governors' mansions, tumbling to their smallest share of elected offices since the 1920s. But somehow Bill and Hill were always the lone exceptions that proved the rule. There is no reason to believe the Clintons' amazing historical immunity to their party's remorseless decay will not continue.
But, if I had to be more mathematical about it, I'd look at it this way. If the Democrats ever want to take back the White House, 2008 is their best shot. After the 2010 census, the electoral college apportionment for the 2012 presidential campaign will reflect the population shifts to the south and west - ie, growing Republican "red'' states will get more votes and declining Democrat "blue'' states will have fewer.
The trouble with being a party that promotes abortion as a sacrament is that after a generation or two it catches up with you: in 2004, the 16 states with the lowest fertility rate voted for John Kerry; 25 of the 26 with the highest fertility rate voted for George W. Bush. In the long run, a lot of Democratic turf is looking as demographically barren as the European Union. And, even discounting the long-term prognosis, right now more red states are trending blue than vice versa.
So, if the Dems don't win in three years' time, things are only going to get worse. In 2008, they need a candidate who can hold all the territory John Kerry won plus flip Ohio or Florida into the Democratic column.
Who can do that for them? As a rule, governors make the best presidential candidates and senators the worst. Senators get mired in proceduralism and compromise, and in extreme cases bogged down in the impenetrable Senatese of John Kerry's signature soundbite (on Iraq spending): "I actually did vote for it before I voted against it.'' So the Democrats would be better off nominating an electable Governor.
Unfortunately, the only one they have is Michigan's Jennifer Granholm, who was born in Canada and thus is ineligible to run for President.
Aside from Miss Granholm, nowadays even Democrat states (Massachusetts, New York, California) have Republican governors. That's where Hillary comes in. She's a Senator, but without the disadvantages. Her Senate seat is a credential not an identity. She's like Natalie Portman's character in Revenge of the Sith: she's a queen playing a senator.
A presidential candidate has to get past three groups: the party base, the media, and the broader electorate. The Democrats' problem is that the base has become unhinged by the war and by Bush. As the party has shrivelled in mass support, so freak-show colossi such as George Soros, Barbra Streisand and Michael Moore have loomed ever larger. Internet moneybags such as moveon.org raised a ton of cash for the Dems in 2004, and in return obliged John Kerry to adopt a position on Iraq and terrorism that ensured he'd be unelectable no matter how much dough they gave him.
The same forces are already in play in the 2008 cycle: supposedly "moderate'' Democrats with presidential aspirations were prevailed upon to vote against Condi Rice's Senate confirmation in order to maintain their bona fides with the deranged left. The only exception to this rule is Hillary. Two weeks back, the Congressional Democrats appeared on the steps of the Capitol to denounce Republicans for their plans to end the filibuster, a Senate procedure much favoured by Dems for blocking the Bush agenda. That's a typical Democratic Party issue these days: all obstructionism all the time. It has no appeal beyond the anti-Bush base. Hillary joined her party colleagues on the steps, but she stood at the back wearing dark glasses. If there'd been a privet hedge, she'd have stood behind that, but as it was she made do with Ted Kennedy. Regardless of what she believes on the issue, she understands that there's no electoral benefit to her in being seen to be just another Democrat obstructionist loser. More to the point, she's the only one who can get away with ignoring the loopy demands of the party's base.
Lately, for example, she's been making some tentative moves away from Democrat orthodoxy on abortion. The abortion absolutism demanded by the party's wrinkly feminist activists is a net vote loser for the Dems, but figuring out how to shake off Gloria Steinem and co is a tricky business. John Kerry was reduced to claiming that, while he personally, passionately believed life began at conception, he would never let his deep personal, passionately held beliefs interfere with his legislative programme; Howard Dean was practically offering to perform partial birth abortions on volunteers from the crowd. But Hillary's begun to sound kinda-sorta-pro-life-ish: "We can all recognise,'' she said the other day, "that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women.'' Really? The abortion lobby doesn't think it's "sad'' and "tragic''. They think the choice is something to be celebrated. Yet, unlike Kerry and Dean, if Senator Clinton tiptoes further down this path, I'll bet the Democrats' feminist enforcers decline to protest.
The war is an even starker example of the distance Hill is putting between herself and the base. The standard line on the left is that Iraq's a quagmire, unwinnable, Bush's Vietnam. Calling for the withdrawal of America's troops, Ted Kennedy said that both the US and the insurgents were "battling for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, and the US is losing''. It's hard to see how you can win someone's heart or mind when you're blowing it into shards across a shopping market. That may well be the most contemptible statement ever to emerge from Kennedy's lips, and that's one competitive category.
By contrast, Hillary says that the insurgency's a "failure''; they're not trying to win hearts and minds, they're "wreaking hatred and violence''. These might sound unexceptional statements of the obvious, but they seem to be beyond most prominent Democrats. The minimum the electorate expects from their presidential candidates is that, in a war, they support America and revile the enemy. Hill fulfils that criterion: she has enough star power to ignore the blame-America-firsters, and occasionally shows signs of being willing to run, Blair-like, to the right of the Republicans on the war issue. The lesson of John Kerry is that a Democrat who doesn't want to lose has to neutralise the national security issue.
Are these feints to the right - tough on terror, equivocal on abortion - merely tactical? Or does Hillary genuinely believe this stuff? Beats me.
The old Hill was summed up by P.J. O'Rourke in the opening to his review of It Takes a Village to Raise a Child: "The village is Washington. You are the child.'' Her supposed autobiography contained no sense of any coherent political philosophy, preferring to rely on autopilot diversity blather: " 'What you don't learn from your mother, you learn from the world,' is a saying I once heard from the Masai tribe in Kenya.'' As I wondered in The Sunday Telegraph at the time, "Any tribesman in particular? Or did they all yell it out in unison as her motorcade passed by?''
Which, if either, of these Hillarys - the quasi-neocon warmonger or the it-takes-a-tribe-to-raze-a-village multiculti drone - is the genuine article is hard to know, but the recent pandering to the right seems more artful. Unlike Kerry and the other Democrats, Hillary's a quick learner. During the 2000 Senate race, I caught an early campaign appearance in New York's rural, Republican North Country. She was terrible - stiff and clumsy, droning platitudes in a metallic monotone. But I saw her a couple of months later, and she was almost charming - not lightly worn Fred Astaire charm; you could see she had to work at it. But nevertheless she did work at it, and she pulled it off. Smart folks adapt: for Republicans to assume they'll be running against the Hillary of 1992 would be a fatal error.
One lesson of her husband's presidency is that, if you spray enough semen over everything in sight, the libertine left will be so busy defending you from the uptight right they won't notice that, for Republicans, Bill Clinton was about as good a Democrat as you could get: he liked to tell friends he governed as an "Eisenhower Republican''.
After all, aside from all the pants-dropping, what exactly did the Democrats have to show for the Clinton years? Welfare reform? Nafta (a North American "common market'' but without all the EU hooey)? Bombing small countries without permission from the UN (Serbia)? That's all Republican stuff. It would be surprising if watching Democrats defend her husband as the tide of presidential DNA lapped ever higher around their waists hadn't left Hillary with a deep contempt for her party - or at the very least a reasonable confidence that they'll be so busy touting her as a woman they'll pay no attention to her own political re-positioning.
I'd say Senator Clinton has a potentially very effective two-pronged strategy, using policy to woo the centre-right and relying on identity-politics to hold the left. The fact of a female candidate will send the media into orgies of diversity celebration. Were Condi Rice to run against a white male Democrat, the press would play it strictly on the issues. But, if it's a white male Republican against Hillary, get set for a non-stop cavalcade of stories with little inset photos of Mrs Thatcher, Mrs Gandhi, Mrs Bandaranaike, etc, etc, and headlines like "Is America Ready?'' that manage to imply ever so subtly that not voting for Hill is the 2008 equivalent of declaring Negroes are three-fifths of a human being. Meanwhile, interviewers will subject her to tough questions such as, "Do you think you've been attacked so harshly by Republicans because our society still has difficulty accepting a strong, intelligent, successful, accomplished woman?'' In the end, Democrats will be solidly behind her, and so will impressionable "independents''. By contrast, the Republicans seem unlikely to wind up with either an eye-catching novelty such as Condi or a solid grown-up pick like Dick Cheney. The hats already three-quarters into the ring are either ineffectual Senate bigwigs (Bill Frist) or "maverick'' media darlings (John McCain), who would prompt enough disaffected conservatives to sit home on election day. The Republicans do have a popular governor of a large state, but his name is Jeb Bush, and even loyal Ba'athists might have drawn the line at Saddam being succeeded by both Uday and Qusay.
A Rodham Administration would lend an obvious symmetry to the past two decades of presidential history: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton. But just as it became clear that Bush Jr was a far more consequential figure than Bush Sr, so the pant-suited Clinton would set out to be a more consequential figure than the pants-less Clinton. She could hardly fail to be, given that he's been left beached by history as the novelty vaudeville intermission between the two great geopolitical conflicts of our time.
As things stand, in the biographical dictionaries, the entry for William Jefferson Clinton will begin: "Second president to be impeached.'' The oddest of presidential couples' best chance of rewriting history is to gamble on double or quits: "William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd president, now best remembered as husband of 44th president, Hillary Rodham (qv).'' The weirdest political marriage of the day has got a lot less creepier since they've been living in separate jurisdictions: for Hill to move into the White House in Washington just as Bill becomes UN Secretary General in New York would seem perfect for their marital equilibrium, and so unlikely it's almost guaranteed to happen. But, even if it doesn't and they're forced to live together again, Bill serving as the nation's First Gentleman and presiding over cheap "cultural'' galas with clapped-out rockers and movie babes seems far more suited to his talents than anything he was doing in the Oval Office apart from Monica.
From the Republicans' point of view, a second Clinton presidency could be as beneficial as the first, which left them with a more lasting grip on the real levers of power in America than they could ever have achieved through the re-election of Bush Sr in 1992. In 2008, the Democrats will have no realistic chance of taking back the Senate or the House of Representatives. So President Hillary will face a Republican Congress that will be far less indulgent of her than it's been of some of George W. Bush's costlier fancies.
Idon't know whether this scenario will come to pass. But the Clintons didn't get where they are without being bold. In 1991 and early 1992, the bigshot Dems like Mario Cuomo sat out the presidential race because none of the experts thought Bush Sr could lose - but an obscure Arkansas governor figured he could. In 1999, the experts thought a sitting First Lady couldn't run for office - but Hillary did. They had plenty of good fortune - Ross Perot vote-splitting in 1992, the pre-9/11 Rudy Giuliani going into emotional meltdown in 2000 - but fortune favours the brave.
For the past decade the Democratic Party's been a Frankenstein monster only the Clintons can jolt into life. In 2004, Michael Moore and co shot the corpse full of juice and still couldn't jump-start it. Six months after the election, new chairman Howard Dean's supposed "revitalisation'' of the party is already a flop. Hillary's the warrior queen on a field of corpses, and in today's Democratic Party that's more than enough.
