Hillary Clinton – Page 3

There’s no crying in politics? Why not?

Hillary Clinton cannot win for losing. It is becoming increasingly clear that the New York senator is being held to a different standard than every other candidate in the race.

Consider yesterday’s mini-firestorm:

Everything is on the table inside Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign if she loses the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, her advisers say — including her style of campaigning, which shifted dramatically on Monday when Mrs. Clinton bared her thoughts about the race’s impact on her personally, and her eyes welled with tears.

“I couldn’t do it if I just didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do,” she said here in reply to a question from an undecided voter, a woman roughly Mrs. Clinton’s age.

Her eyes visibly wet, in perhaps the most public display of emotion of her year-old campaign, Mrs. Clinton added: “I have so many opportunities from this country, I just don’t want to see us fall backwards. This is very personal for me — it’s not just political, it’s not just public.”

Mrs. Clinton did not cry, but her quavering voice and the flash of feeling underscored the pressure, fatigue, anger and disappointment that, advisers say, Mrs. Clinton has experienced since her loss on Thursday in the Iowa caucuses and that she continues to shoulder at this most critical moment.

The Times is playing this pretty straight — but that hasn’t stopped those tears from becoming an issue. And that’s the problem. The array of opinions — to get a sense of what everyone is saying, go to the Times’ The Caucus blog — offers a pretty stark reminder of the biases Clinton faces these days. She has been criticized both for being emotional (read this as code for “weak woman”) and for not being sincere in her emotions (which plays into the stereotype of her as cold and calculating — another in a long line of misogynistic stereotypes used to damage strong women) — sort of a “damed if you do, damned if you don’t” critique.

I’m no fan of the New York senator. She is too much of a centrist for my taste and far too much like her husband: a Democratic triangulator.

But the controversy over her tears seems contrived and a distraction.

Of more significance, I think, maybe the responses from her chief Democratic rivals.

From Barack Obama:

As Mr. Obama stopped briefly for a cup of hot tea in New London, N.H., he was asked about the video image of Mrs. Clinton.

“I didn’t see what happened. I don’t know the context of it,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “I know that this process is a grind, so that’s not something I would care to comment on.”

From John Edwards:

John Edwards was asked for his reaction to Mrs. Clinton’s emotional display at a news conference on Monday.

“I don’t really have anything to say about that,” he said, but then continued, “I think what we need in a commander in chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also very tough business. And the president of the United States is faced with very, very difficult challenges every single day and difficult judgments every single day. What I know is that I’m prepared for that.”

Edwards comes off looking pretty sexist, as Katha Pollitt points out in her blog at TheNation.com:

Today he deployed against Hillary the oldest, dumbest canard about women: they’re too emotional to hold power.

She adds

Ooh, right,we need a big strong manly finger on that nuclear button! Even if that finger has spent most it its life writing personal injury briefs in North Carolina, which, when you come to think of it, is not an obvious preparation for commander-in-chiefhood.

“When people say they don’t want anyone’s finger on the button who cries, I say I don’t want anyone’s finger there who doesn’t cry,” Pat Schroeder told me when we spoke by phone this afternoon. “Tears show someone is a human being.” Schroeder ought to know. In 1987 she was viciously attacked for shedding a few tears while announcing her withdrawal from the presidential race. “Ronald Reagan used to tear up all the time,” she said. ” when John Sununu left the New Hampshire governorship to run Reagan’s campaign he was crying so hard he couldn’t finish his speech. Bush recently teared up. Dozens of male politicians cry. But when a man cries, he’s applauded for having feelings. when a woman cries, she attacked as being weak.”

Edwards backtracked some this morning, saying he wasn’t criticizing Clinton. I’ll let others judge.

In any case, Edwards did come off better than Rudy Giuliani, who opted to use this silliness to once again remind us that he is running for president of 9/11.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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The Clinton myth

Hillary Clinton and her supporters generally offer three or four reasons that the New York senator should be the Democratic nominee for president next year: her experience in the executive branch during her husband’s administration, her ability and willingness to take the fight to the GOP and her chances of succeeding in the general election.

I’ve always been a it dubious of the first — while she was more involved in policy than any first lady in history and possibly more than most vice presidents, she was not an official part of the policy apparatus and her claims to experience essentially boil down to her being the wife of a powerful man. I don’t mean to demean her abilities — which are myriad — or to diminish her real experience as a corporate lawyer, children’s advocate or senator. Oval Office experience, however, is another story.

Then again, I suspect that the experience argument is designed to do more than establish a difference between herself and her chief rivals — Her senate experience, after all, isn’t notably greater than theirs. It is designed to play into rank-and-file Democrats continued, and mostly irrational, love affair with Bill Clinton. The Clinton name, for Democrats, evokes grand memories of a time when they were on top of the world, a rebirth — except, as Thomas Schaller points out today in The Baltimore Sun, the Clinton years were not so good.

Yes, there was a Democrat in the White House, but the party found itself in a surprisingly precarious position at the end of the Clinton years, with Clinton’s vice president running a campaign that sought to minimize its connection to the Clintons and Democratic infrastructure in disarray around the country.

After the eight-year Clinton reign, the Republicans were in better shape. In January 1993, the Republicans were in the minority in Congress, among governors and even in state legislative chambers. By January 2001, they boasted majorities in all three. Plenty of Democrats who lost races during the 1994 “Republican Revolution” have painful memories of the Clintons’ early-term political blunders on gays in the military and health care reform.

Nor was much progress made in the 1990s closing the ideological infrastructure gap. After Al Gore’s defeat in 2000, the Clintons raised millions of dollars for organizations like David Brock’s Media Matters for America and the John Podesta-led Center for American Progress. But the failure to build these institutions when the Clintons held the White House must have tickled congressional Republicans already giddily constructing their formidable K Street Project.

As for Hillary Clinton’s ability to “fight the Republicans,” I think the jury is still out. “(F)ighting,” as Schaller says, “is not the same as winning.”

The truth is that Hillary Clinton’s win-loss record in political conflicts with the Republicans isn’t so great.

Yes, she handily won both of her Senate contests in New York. But her adopted home state isn’t exactly unfavorable partisan terrain, and her opponents were none too impressive.

And

Despite major policy achievements – the 1993 budget package, the 1995 Dayton Accords, the 1997 minimum wage increase – the Clintons had few political knockouts. Victories in the wake of the 1995 government shutdown and the failed impeachment attempt resulted more from GOP overreach than strategic, proactive haymakers thrown by Bill and Hillary.

In the end, Democrats need to reconsider their vetting process. Electability is fool’s gold, as the Kerry campaign should have proven. John Kerry was chosen because of his war record and the sense among Democrats that it would create a coat of armor that Republicans couldn’t pierce. Once they did, it was clear that Kerry offered little to get excited about.

Hillary Clinton may have a lot to offer, but Democrats should remember 2004 and be wary of candidates whose chief claim to the nomination is that they offer the best hope of winning.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Conspiracy theories

Sometimes the shortest analyses are the best. Bob Rixon deconstructs, in a few words, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s offhanded smear of an unnamed Democratic opponent:

“To underscore a point, some people may be running who tell you we don’t face a real threat from terrorism,” she said. “I’m not one of them. We have serious enemies who want to do us serious harm.”

Rixon’s critique:

That’s a Cheneyism, the vague, off-handed smearish comment that holds up a frame with no photo in it. Hmm, who could she mean? Who’s the mystery idiot?

Clinton, of course, has been a round a while and knows how to play this skunky game — her “vast right-wing conspiracy” comment during her husband’s presidency may have been based in a level of truth, but was a vast overstatement designed to undercut criticism.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

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