Clinton trades identity for broad appeal
By Adam de Jong
April 20, 2008 9:38 p.m.
Watching last week’s debate between the Democratic presidential candidates in Philadelphia, I was trying to imagine what the 1973 version of Senator Hillary Clinton would think of her 2008 self.
The Democratic primary has been plodding along mercilessly for so long now, and with no sign that the inevitability of Sen. Barack Obama’s nomination is any less certain than it was a month and a half ago, the most obvious question facing either of the candidates is: Why in the world is Clinton still in this race?
This question shouldn’t be asked with even the faintest hint of condescension, primarily because I have the sneaking suspicion that Clinton is far more intelligent than her former-president husband, every talking head on cable news and almost everyone who has a vested interest in witnessing the election of the first female U.S. president.
In fact, it is precisely because Clinton is so smart that one must wonder why she stays in this race. By staying in this race until the bitter end, and trying to score cheap political points against Obama, Clinton is making herself appear to be the shameless opportunist that Republican opponents have accused her and her husband of being for almost two decades.
Clinton must know how she came off at that debate last week, right? She must have known that when she chastised Obama for his idiotic yet meaningless “bitter” comments that she was unfairly labeling him a radically left-wing elitist in the same way she was unfairly labeled a “feminist elitist” back in 1992 when she said she wouldn’t “be at home baking cookies.”
Clinton had to know while she was on stage in front of the cameras last week that she very calmly and coldly inferred that Obama was a militant black man in the same way she was painted as an emasculating ball-buster when her husband ran for president.
Given her intelligence, Clinton must have known that not only was she being hypocritical, but that her most strenuous supporters ““ the committed progressives, most of whom are products of the 1960s, just like Clinton is ““ were fully aware of her cynical pandering. She knows that, by having photos taken of her downing boilermaker shots or video clips of her talking about how much she adores shooting guns, for every extra vote she notches in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary, she will be roasted on that evening’s edition of “The Daily Show.”
Clinton is too smart not to know that for what is no better than a 10 percent chance of beating Obama, she is willing to become a punch line to the people who she, underneath all that cynicism and thinly veiled ambition, would feel most comfortable with at a dinner party. She has forsaken her true constituency for an abstract notion of “the broad electorate.”
So, while watching Clinton make one sinister comment about Obama’s perceived elitism or unelectability and thinking that Clinton did not believe much of what she was saying about Obama, I couldn’t help but wonder if there is anything left of the old Hillary Rodham. You know, the one who went to work for Children’s Defense Fund when she graduated from Yale Law School; the one who refused to take her husband’s last name; the one who said, in defiance, that she wasn’t a stay-at-home mother not because she wanted to make fun of conservative women, but because she thought it was ridiculous that the national consciousness is of a first lady wearing pink while staring vapidly at her husband.
It was sometime during the debate, when Obama had to defend his patriotism because he didn’t wear an American flag pin on his lapel, that I finally realized that there is no “real” Hillary Clinton.
Clinton planned on winning this election by appealing to that “broad electorate,” hoping that she would still have the support of the left-liberal voters who thought she was secretly still a proud liberal.
It is ironic to think that she has been undone not by the backward-thinking sexists to whom she has pandered at every given moment, but by the most liberal Democratic voters who have opted for Obama.
While it is sad to think of Clinton as betraying her fiercely progressive identity years ago for the broad appeal, it is much scarier to think that maybe Clinton really is not pretending. That’s why she has become a punch line.
It is much easier to laugh at her on “The Daily Show” than wrestle with the possibility that her “moderate” image is for real. It is too difficult to believe that the mask now wears Hillary.
E-mail de Jong at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected].
