Why Hillary Won't Win - Democratic Underground

Thom Little

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Wed Dec-21-05 06:35 PM
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Why Hillary Won't Win

Edited on Wed Dec-21-05 06:42 PM by Thom Little

Each time John McCain stoops to commit some purely, nakedly political act, like campaigning for George W. Bush’s reelection or giving his okay to the teaching of “intelligent design” in public schools, I cringe. There are so few national politicians wired to speak candidly, from the heart and the hip, that I have a soft spot for almost all of them—Bob Kerrey, sure, but also Bob Dole and Bill Weld, even nuts like Jesse Ventura. So when McCain behaves like a normal politician, it’s a disturbing departure from my Frank Capra script for him.

The same kind of gesture from Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, simply confirms what one thinks already, since the script for her (more Cukor, less Capra) is all about cool calculation and calibration in service to the main chance. She is, after all, the feminist who at age 35, seven years married, started calling herself Hillary Rodham Clinton in order to give her husband a better chance at winning back the governorship in old-fashioned Arkansas. So when she announced the other day that she was signing on as a co-sponsor of a new anti-flag-desecration bill—Look at me! I’m jerking right!—it seemed in character. It was one more fragment of evidence, unattractive but inevitable, that she is not really running for reelection to the Senate from New York.

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Such gratuitous moves to the right tend to make all voters doubt her more nuanced and (probably) sincere positions on genuinely important issues. People think she’s being weaselly even if she isn’t. Like when she told a pro-choice crowd that abortion is “a sad, even tragic choice.” That was a worthwhile Sister Souljah moment, smart and effective. Her view of Iraq has been consistent and, to me, convincing—the administration was reckless and incompetent in managing the occupation, but immediate withdrawal or a rigid timetable would also be reckless, and the U.S. must now pay a still-higher price to try to prevent a Zarqawiite victory and Talibanic rogue state. But again, people mistrust her sincerity.

It’s the “authenticity” problem. Bill Clinton is probably every bit as calculating as his wife, but he could mitigate it with his robust charm and half-fake, half-real sincerity. Only the people who made a partisan point of hating him didn’t like Clinton at least a little bit. The same was true of Ronald Reagan. And there you have it: a happy-go-lucky Hollywood divorcé, then a junk-food-loving horndog, and now a frat-boyish former drunk and ne’er-do-well, all three of them mischievous repentant sinners and all of them (yes) sort of hot—American voters have been habitually choosing a certain kind of distinctly American person as president, and Hillary Clinton is not that kind of person.

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/columns/imperialcity/15395/