The case against Hillary (a final argument)

In addition to seeing Barack Obama as a magnificent candidate, promising to turn the page away from the hysteria of the sixties, and bringing an entirely new approach to politics and governing, I voted for him because I just didn't want the Clintons back in the White House.

I watched Hillary's speech yesterday and it was an admirable one, a gracious one, a historical one. It took grit, courage, dignity and great loyalty to her Party to be able to deliver it. I applaud her for it. If that was all I had ever seen of Hillary, and if she was the only candidate presenting a progressive platform, I would have been as enthusiastic about voting for her as many of her supporters.

But that is not all I know of Hillary, and so I could not support her.

It boiled down to this, really: I did not want the Clintons to return to the White House. I've written about this a lot, and most recently in great detail, but the bottom line is that the damage Bill Clinton did as president, in the long view of history, will be seen as far greater than the good he did.

Yes, he presided over a good economy. Yes, he kept us out of major wars. Yes, the nineties were, on the surface at least, good years. The Clinton administration, however, was supposed to move us away from the conservative hold on government during the previous 12 years, and it did not. Health care reform failed, largely because of Hillary Clinton's poor management of it, and Bill Clinton botched his promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military. As a result of the Clinton arrogance which resulted in this mismangagement, the Republicans took over Congress two years after Bill Clinton was inaugurated and held onto it for 12 years. Then we saw a sharp right turn, with welfare reform and NAFTA two of the highlights.

Bill Clinton's term was full of drama, intrigue, and conspiracy theories by both parties. The Republican noise machine tried desperately to find a scandal with which to tarnish Clinton and they finally did. And even as they discovered Monica's blue dress, Hillary was on television talking about the vast right wing conspiracy. The impeachment, fully the fault of Bill Clinton's libido, though at the time we blamed only the Republicans, cost the country the attention of the president and his party and ended the possibilility of any more help for the people. The Clinton drama also, in great measure, cost Al Gore the presidency as people turned to another Bush to "return dignity to the White House."

The great hope we liberals felt in 1992, with the election of Bill Clinton, turned out to be false hope. After the destructive policies of Reagan-Bush, Bill Clinton should have been able to begin a twenty year liberal dominance of government. But his personal character flaws, starting with his narcissism and recklessness, were at least partly responsible for the presidency of George W. Bush and all the horrors it has inflicted on this country.

Perhaps it is fitting that one of the three men most responsible for Hillary's loss is Bill Clinton himself (the other two are Mark Penn, failed strategist, and Barack Obama, who out campaigned her). With Bill's remarks after South Carolina, his angry outbursts and his attacks on the media, Bill did his wife no favors. He has not changed. He still causes trouble.

Hillary Clinton is a talented politician, a gifted and brilliant woman. But she is still married to the man who is responsible for allowing George W. Bush to inhabit the White House, end what should have been twenty or more years of a progressive hold on the White House, and destroy so much of our democracy, our reputation in the world, and our planet. And if elected president, she would bring that man back to the White House with all the risks that would present.

That was a risk I was unwilling to take.

She must be stopped

Hillary Clinton's strategy of "throwing everything but the kitchen sink" at Barack Obama in order to wound him, slow his momentum and convince superdelegates she is more electable was starting to have some effect, especially once the Rev. Wright flap erupted (with some secret help from the Clinton campaign perhaps?), but I suspect it will ultimately not work. There are some indications that the speech given by Obama slowed the bleeding, and now I am hearing and reading commentary that calls for us to chill, stop playing gotcha politics with Obama, and speak like grown-ups about race. I will cite some of that commentary in a later post. In this post I wish to speak personally about why I am so disappointed in and even disgusted by Hillary Clinton.

When the Clintons were under attack from the right wing and the media, before the 1992 election when the allegations of infidelity threatened to doom his candidacy, and again during the Monica scandal and the impeachment, a lot of us felt the Clintons were being treated unfairly and we defended them. I personally stood up to my family and my in-laws who were opposed to Clinton's political agenda and scandalized by his moral failings. I condemned the right wing witch hunts against the Clintons, as did so many other Democrats. In spite of what I knew were their failings, I supported the Clintons, thought impeachment was not justified, and condemned those who were obviously and unfairly out to get them.

Now the Clintons are doing to Barack Obama exactly what was done to them. In the wake of the recent Rev. Wright media blitz, Hillary Clinton has been wooing superdelegates, trying to convince them Barack is unelectable because of it. Instead of standing up for him, as so many stood up for the Clintons when they were being attacked, she is doing the attacking. And she is doing it because all she cares about is winning and gaining power.

Many of us stood up for Bill Clinton when others were attacking him. Even when we found out he had betrayed all of us with his lies, we still stood up for him because we felt he had been treated unfairly. We stood up for Hillary, when people were accusing her of being a lesbian, of causing Bill to cheat on her, and later of staying with him for purely political reasons.

Now, when people are unfairly attacking her opponent in her own party, rather than having the grace and dignity to condemn it, she piles on and tries to take advantage of it.

That is why I condemn Hillary Clinton, while I will never again defend or support her, and why I will not vote for her if she is the nominee. I defended her husband even after he betrayed his supporters with his lies about his behavior. I will not defend her when she adopts the tactics that were used against her and her husband, and attacks a member of her own party so obviously, so callously and so unfairly. As far as I can tell, everything Hillary Clinton has ever done, from her work in the Rose Law Firm, to working for specific liberal policies, to staying with a philandering husband, to voting for the Iraq War, has been done for one reason only: to someday win the White House.

Barack Obama got in the way of her life's ambition and she will apparently stop at nothing - not even fomenting racism - to shove him out of the way. For that reason, she must be stopped.

What we don't need: a divisive candidate

As of today, polls show Hillary Clinton slightly ahead of Barack Obama among Democratic voters, with Obama gaining ground slowly as voters get to know him, and more closely scrutinize Hillary Clinton, the candidate with more name recognition. It remains to be seen if he can catch up, but Hillary's popularity is puzzling for one reason: she is an extremely divisive figure.

Even her most ardent supporters would have to agree that Hillary Clinton is divisive. In fact, some of her supporters, I believe, take great delight in that. They think she is divisive because she is a fighter, and after eight years of Republican attrocities, they want to line up behind a fighter.

I don't think the candidate herself wants to be divisive. I would imagine that a presidential candidate wants to attract as many voters as possible, so divisiveness is not something she embraces. Even as she has a reputation for being tough, Hillary Clinton is a woman, a wife, a mother, and a human being who believes in helping the less fortunate. So I have to think she has a soft side that secretly wants to be liked, or even loved, as a good and decent person and a candidate whose heart is in the right place. Her semi-tearful moment prior to the New Hampshire primary sent that message quite clearly, even if it isn't clear whether the moment was spontaneous or calculated.

Yet, in spite of what she might desire, Hillary Clinton is and will always be a divisive figure. It is important to acknowledge why this is so, and what it might mean both in the general election, and in an imagined Hillary Clinton presidency.

Hillary Clinton has a history as the wife of a president who was impeached and who, before her husband's Monica Lewinsky moment was acknowledged, claimed that both she and her husband were under siege by a "vast right wing conspiracy." Now many of us felt at the time that there was, and still is, a strong right wing attempt to defeat Democratic politicians, although the use of the word "conspiracy" was not a wise one in that it was an attempt to make her and her husband look like victims, and displayed an unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of their failings.

The Clintons were divisive figures long before Monica, however, in that they came to the White House with an agenda that was never intended to bring their opponents on board. Their arrogant and clumsy overreach in several areas (eg. gays in the military, health care) is partly why the Republicans took the leadership of the Congress in 1994, just two years after Bill Clinton was inaugurated.

Hillary Clinton's divisiveness may have begun during her husband's campaign when she said she wasn't a "Tammy Wynette stand by your man" kind of wife, but that divisiveness blossomed during the Health Care initiative, which was her project. It was then that she earned a reputation as a fighter who did not know how or was unwilling to work with her political opponents to reach her objective of universal health care. As a result, the Congress has been unwilling to return to the question of universal coverage, leaving millions and millions of Americans uninsured for the past fourteen years. That's an enormous price to pay for someone's arrogant and divisive behavior.


Hillary Clinton is divisive for a second reason: because she is such an obvious power hungry politician, and in this election, a consummate divide and conquer one. In Karl Rove fashion, she and her strategists seem willing to cobble together a slim majority by pandering to Hispanics and women and tossing African Americans aside, as they did in North Carolina. So even if she shares a tearful moment with voters, and even as she sounds brilliant on the issues, behind the scenes she is a consummate politician who knows exactly where the Democratic votes are and how to manipulate them in her favor.

One more thing makes Hillary Clinton divisive. She is still married to one of the most divisive figures in recent American politics and, if elected president, will bring him back into the White House. Anyone who doubts the divisiveness of Bill Clinton need only remember his behavior of the past few weeks, using racial innuendo and heavy handed attacks against his wife's opponent. It has even been reported that one of the things that convinced Ted Kennedy not to endorse Hillary was Bill's outrageous behavior.

If the former president's behavior can divide Democrats, how much more can it divide the country in the general election, or if by some miracle Hillary becomes president? In those few weeks after Iowa, Bill Clinton nearly demolished her candidacy with his arrogance and outspokenness. If he can cause that much damage in the campaign, what might he do once he is back in the White House? In a general election, I suspect voters will decide they don't want Bill Clinton's narcissistic ego and unchecked appetites distracting his wife and scuttling her agenda, and so the ultimate risk of a Clinton candidacy is that she would hand the White House to John McCain and the Republicans.

Anyone who thinks a Hillary Clinton general election campaign would not be filled with reminders of her husband's peccadilloes, her willingness to forgive him, and his ultimate impeachment, is living in an alternate universe. The Republicans say they know how to run against Hillary and they are storing up their ammunition, waiting for the fall campaign. I think we should take them at their word.

I can see it now:

Commercials attacking her for her inability to see reality when her husband was having fun in the Oval Office;

Commercials attacking Bill Clinton for being so engaged in the scandal that he took his eye off of Bin Laden;

Commercials pointing to her "experience" in things wives don't want to experience;

Commercials showing the victory party on the White House lawn after impeachment.

It will go on and on. The Republicans have reams of videotape with Hillary and Bill Clinton doing and saying things that will remind voters of things they'd rather forget. It won't be pretty. And when Hillary's "flip-flop" on the war is highlighted, and her past is compared to McCain's war hero past, she won't win.

As we go to vote on Tuesday, we need to ask ourselves, no matter how much we may like a candidate, can he or she win? Hillary Clinton's divisiveness must give us concern.

We also need to determine not only if this is the right person to be president, but if this is the right person for this time? Some may look at the differences between Clinton and Obama and calculate that she has more experience on the national stage, and that is true. But is that enough? After eight years of a tumultuous Clinton presidency, no matter how good the economy may have been, and eight years of a tumultuous Bush presidency, the country is hungry for something new. They're just not yet sure who offers that, which is why the voters are still so uncertain for whom they will vote in just four days.

Hillary and Barack both look like someone new, but aside from her gender, Hillary is not a new kind of candidate, while Barack, race aside, is indeed new. Voting for her would be going back to something that we may remember fondly, as we compare it to the disastrous Bush years, but we forget at our peril how divisive the Clinton years were, and how that divisiveness meant that much of the Clinton agenda failed or had to be seriously modified to please Republicans. We also forget how serious distractions can be in the White House. Without the distraction of Monica and impeachment, for instance, might we have managed to stop Bin Laden? That isn't to leave the Republicans off the hook for their politically calculated actions, or to say Bill Clinton deserved impeachment. But if he had been acting as a president, rather than a philanderer, in the Oval Office, he would never have given them an opening.

Throughout this primary season, one thing has become obvious to me. There are going to be huge problems when the spouse of a former president becomes president herself. No matter how talented or brilliant, that spouse is going to have a problem like no other president. How does the new president both pursue her agenda and still protect the legacy of her spouse? How does her spouse, once the most powerful person on the planet take a back seat? Or does he? And if he doesn't, are we really electing him for a third term? Human nature and marriage being what they are, will there be conflicting loyalties between that to spouse and that to country? And beyond that, when that spouse was impeached because of bad behavior, no matter how trivial it may have seemed to some, how can we trust that the bad behavior will not return? The best way to predict future behavior is to look at past behavior. We should have known that when we voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. Many warned of his sexual misconduct, but we overlooked it, and it ultimately became a terrible distraction.

We can't afford another distracted president. We can't afford another divisive president. We must turn the page on the Clinton and Bush dynasties and inject new blood into the White House.

If, in spite of all the problems with a Clinton candidacy, we choose her as our nominee, I fear we will have lost the best opportunity we have to rescue our country. Hillary Clinton may be a good person and a brilliant politician, but that is not what we need now. Even if she is the right person, she is the right person at the wrong time, which means she is the wrong person.

That is the primary reason I cannot vote for her, no matter how much I admire her intelligence, her ambition and her accomplishments.

Like so many others, I believe we need someone who can inspire, who has a vision, who brings us together, who has no history of scandal or brutal divisiveness. We need someone who will not be distracted by a larger-than-life ex president and spouse. We don't just need a candidate from a different party, we need a different kind of candidate, one who can move us in an entirely new direction.

Hillary Clinton may say she is that candidate. She is not.