Dear Hillary, There is no Day One
March 5, 2008 | Filed Under Election 2008, Opinion and Commentary | No Responses
This article appears on the The Huffington Post. Sometime in the mid-1990s I recall saying that if Hillary Clinton ever ran for president, I’d quit my job and go to work on her campaign. Over the years I changed my mind. By the time she did announce her candidacy for president I was saying, “If she is elected, I might have to leave the country.” But, during this long election season, at the dozenth or so debate point, I began to feel that I had perhaps been rash. The woman did seem to have experience, smarts, toughness, and Washington savvy. Sometimes she even made some of the men in the initial field look like amateurs. Now she just makes everyone else look incredibly decent, ethical, and fair.
This is typical of the roller coaster ride that is the Clinton’s story. I had such hopes for both of them on January 20, 1993. Which brings us to why there is no Day One and can never be a Day One for Hillary. If she were elected, January 20, 2009 would actually be Day 5845 for her, that is, if we count the days since Bill Clinton was sworn in as 42nd president and his two-for-one presidency began. Since she is leveraging their joint White House legacy in the current campaign, and if all that experience is supposed to count, it seems fair to look at things that way.
Yesterday, or Day 5523, I decided I was done with giving Hillary Clinton the benefit of the doubt. This is so clearly Barack Obama’s moment that I wish that the Democratic Party apparatus that she and Bill are no doubt cajoling, bribing, threatening, and blackmailing at this very moment would tell her to get lost. The Red Phone ad, and the deliberate hesitancy in asserting the non-issue of Obama’s religion – not to mention her failure to bring up her experience of attending Congressional members’ Christian prayer breakfasts with him when she was asked about the Muslim rumor – eroded any fragile hope I had of her rising above the petty and the political.
To me her answer, as so much of what she says, is leveraged as an opportunity, in this case to give the speculation oxygen rather than to cut it off.
In the answer below, substitute “I know he is a Christian” for “as far as I know” and you’ll see what I mean about opportunism. “KROFT: You don’t believe that he’s a Muslim? HILLARY: No. No. Why would I? There’s no … No. There’s nothing to base that on - as far as I know.”
The negative campaigning leading up to her desperate bid for Ohio and Texas was the final straw. I have little doubt that the Hillary I am seeing now is part of a longtime pattern. Those days since January 1993 have been a terrible mix of political missteps, centrist compromises, expediency, psychodrama, a failure to both live up to the youthful Clinton ideals and to understand how to achieve them in Washington, and amoral ambition. I’ll grant that there were enough successes to make me love Bill Clinton in spite of his compromises and his enormous personal shortcomings. Given his successor in the White House, it was enough to make one weep with longing every time that Bill spoke. Oh, to have a president with a brain again!
And then Bill hit the campaign trail for Hillary, behaving in a way that made it impossible to forget the man who had betrayed the best hopes of his wife, his daughter, his friend Al Gore, his party, and his country for the sake of a few minutes of bizarre sexual gratification. It wasn’t about the sex; it was the puerile bid for attention, the enormity of his self-indulgence, and his lack of character that came to mind again and again every time the man campaigned for his wife.
When we look at the Days, there is a long and sad and dirty trail of history that makes the Day One slogan both appalling and ridiculous. It would have been compelling and stirring if this indeed were Hillary’s moment, but the dual Clinton story has doomed her to tragedy that would be Shakespearean if it were not so cheesy. It’s time to get her off the stage, or let her act out her part as a Senator. I want no more of the Clinton maneuvering, politicking, cunning, blundering, and alternating meanness and expediently misty-eyed authenticity in my White House.
Finally, the thought of Bill Clinton in the White House again, butting in, eating donuts, wandering the halls, and goodness knows what else, takes away my appetite. I have every confidence that he would screw things up for both of them again (although she seems quite able to do that on her own). And then we’d have only a four year Democratic run, hampered by unceasing Clinton static, 
and followed by another Republican regime. The question is not just one of whether she is electable. Would she be re-electable? As for that morally repugnant ad, I have the feeling that when the red phone rang at 3:00 AM, it’d be Bill who grabbed the receiver. Imagine Hillary gripping his wrist in mid-air and screaming, “It’s my turn, goddammit!” And I doubt very much that our children would be safer with Hillary in the White House with Bill in tow. Certainly not if your child happens to be a White House intern.
See an excellent Michael Seitzman piece (posted on the Huffington Post) on how Hillary would behave on Day Two.
UPDATE, May 10: See also, with thanks to Donna G for pointing this out to me, see Camille Paglia’s salon.com pieces on Hillary. Very interesting.
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