Hillary Clinton: The Democrats' George W. Bush
Feb 19, 2007 Filed in: Politics
Senator Clinton Alienates Progressives With Her
"Never Admit Mistakes" Campaign
Hatred of Hillary Clinton on the Far Right approaches the pathologic, and is so prominent it ought to be given its own name; call it That Damn Woman Syndrome. Tapping into that hatred is keeping a hopeless candidate like Rudy Giuliani at the current head of the GOP pack, with the simple logic that any hard-nosed conservative—most of whom would rather see him pilloried than elected—will vote for him if the other choice is that damn woman! Given that such hatred is the ultimate “street cred” for Progressives, it is surprising that TDWS is almost as pervasive on the Left as it is on the Right.
Months before the 1992 election, Hillary Clinton first brought infamy to herself by saying, during an interview on Nightline: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.”
Conservatives didn’t need a whole lot more reason to hate Hillary; just her assertion that children should be declared legally competent (which would allow children to sue their parents) was plenty. But the “cookies” statement turned a storm of anti-Hillary sentiment into a hurricane. It was, in their view, arrogant, anti-family, anti-marriage, cold and calculating. The rest of the campaign only hardened their opinion of her.
The view on the Left, meanwhile, was quite the opposite. The election of Bill Clinton in November of 1992 meant to Liberals and Progressives that there would be a First Lady who was anything but window dressing to her husband. She was smart, articulate, and had a strength of will that hearkened back to Eleanor Roosevelt. But a lot has changed in the last fifteen years, and now there are probably almost as many new-generation Progressives as there are old-school Conservatives who see Clinton as cold and calculating.
There are many reasons for this: First, there is the Iraq War. She voted to authorize it in 2002. So did a lot of other Democrats in the Senate, but most of them have disavowed that vote. But Clinton steadfastly refuses to recant that vote, or call it a mistake, as former Senator and 2008 hopeful John Edwards did in an opinion piece in November 2005. Even the fact that it’s costing her votes does not faze her. Progressives are starting to feel that the formidable Clinton shares one chilling trait in common with George W. Bush: Never admit you’re wrong, even when it’s painfully obvious that your lack of candor is costing you support.
She has displayed other too-close-to-George sentiments that are setting progressives teeth on edge. On the Iraq war, she has said repeatedly that had she been president in 2002, we would not have gone to war, but that she still made the right decision in authorizing, because she was given bad information. In other words, I was a pawn, and did as I was told, but make me Queen and I’ll do a better job.
Besides not admitting the Iraq vote was a mistake, she states that she will not redeploy all troops out of the region if elected president. “There will be missions,” she said ominously. And while there rest of the country (and the whole world) is screaming to Bush to not make the Iraq mess worse by attacking Iran, Clinton insists “No option can be taken off the table,” in dealing with Iran, including military action.
In trying to break the glass ceiling of presidential politics, she obviously thinks that her admit-no-mistakes policy is the best way forward, but if she thinks that by sticking to her guns (literally) she is going to avoid John Kerry’s fate of being labeled a flip-flopper, it’s already too late: The Necons, remembering their success with Kerry, have already started calling her a flip flopper. Meanwhile, she is fooling no one with her nuanced “If I had only known” explanation; if tens of millions of progressives were able to see through the Bush Administration lies that led up to the Iraq invasion (Iraq-Al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction, 9/11 connection), how is it that a US Senator was not able to see through them? She would do better to take a lesson about learning from mistakes from another politician, the Gipper himself, who escaped unscathed from a completely botched Lebanon deployment by taking responsibility, admitting his mistake, and moving on.
Moving on is exactly what progressives want to see in any presidential candidate: Moving on in Iraq; moving on in the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process; moving on in economic development at home and abroad; moving on toward a balanced budget that stops giving the best pieces of the pie to the super rich at the expense of the middle class; moving on toward reclaiming this country from the badly misguided policies of politicians who can’t admit mistakes. And moving on is something the steadfast Clinton shows no inclination of doing, giving progressives a bad case of TDWS.
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Hatred of Hillary Clinton on the Far Right approaches the pathologic, and is so prominent it ought to be given its own name; call it That Damn Woman Syndrome. Tapping into that hatred is keeping a hopeless candidate like Rudy Giuliani at the current head of the GOP pack, with the simple logic that any hard-nosed conservative—most of whom would rather see him pilloried than elected—will vote for him if the other choice is that damn woman! Given that such hatred is the ultimate “street cred” for Progressives, it is surprising that TDWS is almost as pervasive on the Left as it is on the Right.
Months before the 1992 election, Hillary Clinton first brought infamy to herself by saying, during an interview on Nightline: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.”
Conservatives didn’t need a whole lot more reason to hate Hillary; just her assertion that children should be declared legally competent (which would allow children to sue their parents) was plenty. But the “cookies” statement turned a storm of anti-Hillary sentiment into a hurricane. It was, in their view, arrogant, anti-family, anti-marriage, cold and calculating. The rest of the campaign only hardened their opinion of her.
The view on the Left, meanwhile, was quite the opposite. The election of Bill Clinton in November of 1992 meant to Liberals and Progressives that there would be a First Lady who was anything but window dressing to her husband. She was smart, articulate, and had a strength of will that hearkened back to Eleanor Roosevelt. But a lot has changed in the last fifteen years, and now there are probably almost as many new-generation Progressives as there are old-school Conservatives who see Clinton as cold and calculating.
There are many reasons for this: First, there is the Iraq War. She voted to authorize it in 2002. So did a lot of other Democrats in the Senate, but most of them have disavowed that vote. But Clinton steadfastly refuses to recant that vote, or call it a mistake, as former Senator and 2008 hopeful John Edwards did in an opinion piece in November 2005. Even the fact that it’s costing her votes does not faze her. Progressives are starting to feel that the formidable Clinton shares one chilling trait in common with George W. Bush: Never admit you’re wrong, even when it’s painfully obvious that your lack of candor is costing you support.
She has displayed other too-close-to-George sentiments that are setting progressives teeth on edge. On the Iraq war, she has said repeatedly that had she been president in 2002, we would not have gone to war, but that she still made the right decision in authorizing, because she was given bad information. In other words, I was a pawn, and did as I was told, but make me Queen and I’ll do a better job.
Besides not admitting the Iraq vote was a mistake, she states that she will not redeploy all troops out of the region if elected president. “There will be missions,” she said ominously. And while there rest of the country (and the whole world) is screaming to Bush to not make the Iraq mess worse by attacking Iran, Clinton insists “No option can be taken off the table,” in dealing with Iran, including military action.
In trying to break the glass ceiling of presidential politics, she obviously thinks that her admit-no-mistakes policy is the best way forward, but if she thinks that by sticking to her guns (literally) she is going to avoid John Kerry’s fate of being labeled a flip-flopper, it’s already too late: The Necons, remembering their success with Kerry, have already started calling her a flip flopper. Meanwhile, she is fooling no one with her nuanced “If I had only known” explanation; if tens of millions of progressives were able to see through the Bush Administration lies that led up to the Iraq invasion (Iraq-Al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction, 9/11 connection), how is it that a US Senator was not able to see through them? She would do better to take a lesson about learning from mistakes from another politician, the Gipper himself, who escaped unscathed from a completely botched Lebanon deployment by taking responsibility, admitting his mistake, and moving on.
Moving on is exactly what progressives want to see in any presidential candidate: Moving on in Iraq; moving on in the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process; moving on in economic development at home and abroad; moving on toward a balanced budget that stops giving the best pieces of the pie to the super rich at the expense of the middle class; moving on toward reclaiming this country from the badly misguided policies of politicians who can’t admit mistakes. And moving on is something the steadfast Clinton shows no inclination of doing, giving progressives a bad case of TDWS.
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