Lucy Holds the Football

I was studiously curious about the outcome of yesterday’s primaries, and my gut was pulling for Obama. That’s an emotional response, nothing more. Obama’s got nothing for me – he’s smooth and vacuous and kind of pointless. I saw the way my son was roped in by his charm, and thought that it’s not a bad thing for a young person to get caught up in political idealism. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a leader who could turn on a crowd. So I was pulling for him.

Hillary Clinton represents the cold cynicism of machine politics to me. I’m snake-bitten by her husband – he plays a liberal on TV these days, but when he had power, he governed like a Republican, prancing around like an Ivy League scholar while beating the tar out of liberals. Republicans have the luxury of putting up candidates who reflect their deeply held views. We on the Democratic side have to hope that our candidates really mean what they say. They usually don’t. We’re supposedly the liberal party, but we’re not allowed to have liberals represent us. Always some bland centrist-righty.

Take Social Security, for example. Republicans want to privatize it. That’s scary and dangerous, but make no mistake about their position. Hillary? She wants a bipartisan commission to study it. A bipartisan commission! That’s what I mean – you never know what you are getting with these centrist Democrats, but it is discomforting.

Here’s a passage from Alexander Cockburn’s review of Sally Beddell Smith’s book, The Clinton’s, For Love of Politics: Bill and Hillary Clinton, The White House Years:

Bill Clinton “typically had a half-dozen books going at any one time.” His briefing primers “ran more than one hundred pages.” … He would jolt officials out of a deep sleep “to discuss policy questions.” Bill’s old friend David Leopoulus “believed that ‘the job of the presidency’ was ‘all that Bill and Hillary talked about.”

But the gabfests went round and round in circles because very early in Little Rock, Arkansas, Bill and Hillary had also learned conclusively that a hundred worthy position papers, each a thousand pages long, weigh less in the balance of forces than a single phone call from the CEO of Georgia Pacific or Tyson Chicken or WalMart. In tune with the decay of liberalism in the 1970’s and 1980’s, their political lives were permanently schizophrenic: on the one hand, rhetorical ardor for reform as expressed in Hillary’s speeches as board member of her friend Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund, on the other hand, as Bedell Smith convincingly displays, time after time chill betrayal: in the case of welfare, Hillary was the one who ordered the president to sign the Republicans’ bill, thus betraying everything Hillary claimed she stood for. Bill refused to back Marian’s husband, Peter, in his hopes for a federal judgeship, on the grounds that he was too liberal, and then was too chicken to tell him. Edelman learned of his betrayal in the morning newspaper.

This is the essence of Clintonism – fiery rhetoric, intellectual depth, vacuous positions, and backstabbing. Did Bill lack the courage of his convictions? No – not likely. He was too cowardly to openly face people he betrayed, but it goes deeper than that. He merely lacked convictions.

Hillary, on the other hand, apparently has convictions. Only, she’s not letting on what they are. That will come as a surprise, the result of some bipartisan commission. We’ll read about it in the morning paper.

The guy who did us in, the real culprit, was John Edwards. When he was in the Senate, he was a conservative southerner. Where rubber met road, he was a righty. Then this campaign – he said all the right things, enticed us, gathered us up to make a run for the prize, and then unceremoniously dumped us. It seems that when a Pied Piper is needed, one emerges – Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and John Edwards in 2008. John Edwards made certain that the nominee of the Democratic Party would be a conservative Democrat. Whether he intended that or not is immaterial. That is the end result.

So I awake on the morning after Super Tuesday, and rush to the computer to find out who won California, because I want Steve to be pleased. There’s not much more in it for me in this silly election.