I want to draw attention to a New Jersey blogger who has, I think, summed up the failures of the Clinton campaign and the apparent narcissism that fuels what is looking more and more like a lost cause.
Clinton, as Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast writes, has attempted to paint herself as something that she isn’t — a progressive — while at the same time being weighed down by her husband.
I don’t know about anyone else, but when I see her talk about creating good jobs at good wages, I want to shout at the TV, “Then why do you cozy up to the very companies that want to send those very jobs overseas?” She gives lip service to “retraining”, but says nothing about the nature of the jobs for which already highly skilled IT workers should “retrain.” Granted, she’s in a difficult position, because she either has to run on her words or run on her (and let’s face it, Bill’s) record. And for someone who refuses to ever admit that she was wrong, she has a long track record of supporting policies that she now repudiates on the stump without ever using the words “wrong” or “mistake.”
She adds this:
Clinton’s biggest problem is that the transformational nature of her candidacy is by definition muted by the inescapable fact that a Hillary Clinton presidency is not something entirely new, and it’s not uncharted territory. We’ve been here before. Assuming that the Obama Train continues its relentless roll into Denver and wraps things up by then, the irony of the Clinton candidacy will be that the first viable woman candidates’s aspirations were largely thwarted by the very husband whose own departing popularity ratings in 2000, after surviving eight years of Republican witch hunts, was still higher than George W. Bush’s have been for most of his presidency. Bill Clinton was supposed to be her biggest asset, and it seems he’s been her biggest liability, for all that people DO remember his presidency fondly. He’s become a liability because without the presidency and the ability to formulate policy as a backdrop, and when the campaign’s back is against the wall, all of Bill Clinton’s flaws have come to the fore — the “It’s all about me” narcissism. The need for attention and adulation. The relentlessness that’s no longer cloaked in a smile and a lower lip curled so fetchingly under his teeth.
Essentially, Clinton became the frontrunner early when she was the only one with serious name recognition and the party was still lost in a romantic lust for a successful past. Not that the past was all that great or that the party was all that healthy during the Clinton years, but Bill and Hillary were living in the White House and George W. Bush was not.
Once the campaign began and Barack Obama presented himself as an alternative that was looking ahead, her campaign started to crumble.
While there remains a possibility that she can rebound and win the nomination, the window is closing. And the smaller the opening becomes, the more of the old Clinton streetfighter attitude becomes apparent — as well as the sense of entitlement. Remember, the Clinton presidency was won built on the demise of the old Democratic coalition, one that made welfare reform a cause celebre and triangulation its chief philosophical attitude, making elements of the GOP Contract With America its own to maintain its grip on the White House.
I have no illusions about an Obama presidency. He’s already shown a willingness to tack right when he thinks it will be beneficial (his healthcare plan, for instance), but I like his energy and I think he probably has better progressive instincts than Hillary Clinton, more genuine progressive sensibilities, and is more likely to craft a larger coalition to get the right kinds of things done.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
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Hank Kalet 