Kevin Williamson is one of my favorite writers and I have read his book and thoroughly enjoyed it. Today he has an excellent column on Hillary Clinton that seems to me very insightful.
[T]he Democrats place an extraordinary value on cleverness: They are the party of the student council, and Bill Clinton has spent 50-odd years proving to the world that he is the cleverest boy at Hot Springs High School, and his admirers loved him not in spite of his gross opportunism and dishonesty but because of those very things. Finally, the Democrats rejoiced, a man who can show those Republicans for the unsophisticated, unclever fools that they are! Mrs. Clinton is at the moment looking somewhat short of clever.
I have thought all along that Bill was the clever boy in school who was almost an accidental president. George Bush was convinced to raise taxes at the beginning of a recession, I have always believed, as part of a deal to get Democrats to vote for the Gulf War. There has been considerable speculation about Al Gore’s vote for the Gulf War.
Later that night, Sen. Gore called Greene and asked if Sen. Dole had scheduled him for a prime-time speaking slot. When Greene said nothing had been finalized yet, Gore erupted, “Damn it, Howard! If I don’t get 20 minutes tomorrow I’m going to vote the other way!”
Gore wanted more time on TV. What about Dan Rostenkowski ? The Democrats supported Bush in the Gulf War vote by a minority of 32% of their members
Democrats: 86-179. 86 (32%) of 267 Democrats voted for the resolution.
I have always believed that there was a price to be paid for that vote and it was to raise taxes. Anyway, breaking his pledge cost Bush the 1992 election. Bill Clinton was the beneficiary as Mario Cuomo had declined to run, considering Bush unbeatable after the quick victory in Kuwait.
The early 1960s were defined by a dramatic political polarity: the glib and vague but attractive and clever John Kennedy set in contrast to the hard, scheming intelligence of the fundamentally uncool Richard Nixon. As Oliver Stone’s fictitious Nixon put it when addressing a portrait of the late Kennedy: “People look at you, and they see who they want to be. They look at me, and they see what they are.” The Clintons’ marriage contains uncomfortably within it both of those poles, and Mrs. Clinton, unhappily for her, is the Nixon in the relationship.
I think Nixon was the victim of a coup d’etat by Mark Felt, the former FBI assistant Director who acted as “Deep Throat” for the Washington Post. Nixon was too soft hearted about his junior associates who committed the ridiculous burglary and he was too concerned about history to destroy the incriminating tapes.
Nixon, the best efforts of his admirers notwithstanding, is remembered mainly as the one thing he insisted he was not — a crook — largely repudiated by the very same conservative movement that once embraced him, his face familiar outside that movement mostly as a grotesque latex mask. Nixon was — and is — a monster, in the ancient sense of that word: a warning, an omen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is a monster for our times.
I think this is unfair to Nixon was was a towering figure in foreign affairs. His domestic record is best forgotten as he was one of the Republicans who had swallowed the Roosevelt fantasy whole. Hillary, however, is all about domestic policy. She is an ignoramus about foreign affairs, as is Obama.
She came into politics as a genuine firebrand, an organizer of student strikes who famously wrote her senior thesis on the tactics of radical activist Saul Alinsky and proposed far-reaching changes to family law, and who would later advance the work of far-left organizations such as the National Lawyers Guild and various PLO-aligned groups through her work at the New World Foundation. Her causes were the wrong ones, but her advocacy of them seems to have been genuine.
She was, as are so many Socialists, incompetent in actually performing. They are all about theory which is why they turn so quickly to force and compulsion to try to accomplish goals inconsistent with human nature.
The wheels came off of that as soon as she achieved proximity to real power: President Clinton put her in charge of his health-care program, and it was a catastrophe. She was never really allowed to have her hands on another substantive policy issue, and her most prominent role throughout the rest of her time in the White House was spent not basking in the glow of the presidency but obscured in its shadow, reduced to little more than helping her husband to avoid suffering the consequences of his sexual adventuring and his lying about that under oath. She marched into Washington a “co-president” and slithered out an appendage.
This is a wonderful analysis of Hillary Clinton and it may also apply to many politicians in national affairs. We no longer have the lengthy apprenticeship in government that once saw men (rarely women) move from job to job learning as they went. Now, it is all about television. Fortunately, she seems to be inept at that. Sadly, that is aboat all Obama is good at.