Pillorying Hillary

[wyldwolf]

Why do people detest her? Let Lexington count the ways. First, and most obviously, conservatives cannot stand her. They see her, as Bay Buchanan (Pat's sister) put it in another recent Hillary-bashing book, as an “ardent feminist, anti-war activist and student radical” who “did not leave her passion for all things liberal behind on the campuses of Wellesley and Yale”. The Hillary of conservative demonology is practically a socialist...

...many on the left loathe her too. The anti-war crowd resents her for voting to allow the use of force in Iraq... Many ardent feminists also abhor Mrs Clinton. In These Times, a left-wing magazine, published an essay in April entitled “Why Women Hate Hillary”, arguing that in her determination to appear as ruthless and macho as her male rivals, she has betrayed the women's movement. The Nation, another lefty periodical, recently ran a cover story arguing that while many women approve of Mrs Clinton, a lot of feminists think she is “a ventriloquist for the patriarchy”, in the words of Jane Fonda, an actress.

The anti-Hillary jibes of left and right cannot all be true. For all her talents, Mrs Clinton cannot be a warmonger and a peacenik, or a radical feminist and a shill for the patriarchy. Perhaps if extremists of both left and right detest her, she must in fact be a nice, reasonable moderate. There is something to this. Since the debacle of Hillarycare, and especially since she joined the Senate in 2001, she has eschewed radicalism in favour of cautious, incremental steps to improve health care, the environment and national security.

Mrs Clinton may not be the most likeable of candidates, but she has enormous strengths. She has learned from past mistakes, even if she has not admitted them. She has a prodigious memory, a bottomless capacity for hard work and a quarter-century of experience of national politics. In debates, her grasp of policy makes her Democratic rivals look callow or shallow. Her campaign organisation is second to none. She can borrow credit for the peace and prosperity of the first Clinton era. And whatever Ms Fonda would prefer, she gets a huge boost from women who want to see one of their own in the White House. In part because there are more female Democrats than black ones, she leads Mr Obama by double digits in polls of likely primary voters.

But as the publication this month of two exhaustive new biographies showed, there is little fresh dirt to dig up on Mrs Clinton. And since Americans have already heard the worst, her negative ratings may already have hit a ceiling, which is probably not true of any other candidate.

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9366224

Yes, there are part of this piece I didn't put in this post. No, there was no nefarious reason for that.