Sure, I'll vote for the monster, almost surely, if she's the Dem nominee--even though I don't think she and Bill will support the nominee if she isn't

BFFs Hill 'n' McCranky--isn't it a shame that they
can't run together to serve as co-presidents?

I think we can all agree that this has been a strange presidential season.

On the GOP side, starting with a field that could only have been assembled to illustrate the many varieties of incompetence, ideological wackitude, moral turpitude, and big-lie dishonesty huddled under the Tattered Tent of Modern Republicanism, the nomination has gone by acclimation--as a result of the Minister Hucksterbee Mind Meld that neutralized Willard Romney--to a candidate so pathetic and inept (not to mention corrupt, since of course Republicans would never hold that against him) that he'd already been written off as roadkill. Astonishingly, Senator McCranky, the sleaziest and most unprincipled contender in a field that was unbridled Sleazomania, now appears to command a united party poised to make a serious bid for the White House.

On the Democratic side, while there is certainly an element of surprise in the young and relatively untested Barack Obama winding up as one of the Last Candidates Standing, it was less surprising that the officially designated "major" candidates included no one whose stands on the issues might have inspired progressive voters. When the field narrowed to three, there was clearly appeal in some of the things John Edwards said, but for at least some of us there was never the sense that he was really committed to what he was saying, and hardly any clue as to what he might have been willing to fight for in the White House. (I do love that Elizabeth Edwards, but she wasn't the candidate.) Oh sure, he got screwed in terms of media attention, no question. But I don't think that's the only reason, or necessarily the principal reason, why his campaign never took off.

And then there were two--and things got really strange.

For those of us who'd been mostly sitting on the sidelines--unable to muster much enthusiasm for the Final Two but fully expecting to support whichever came out of the process, on the ground that he or she would be orders of magnitude preferable to whatever life form emerged from the Republican miasma--it was positively weird to find that we "undecideds" were viewed as suspicious persons if not actual enemy combatants by zealous partisans of the Final Two. (Of course it was surprising to begin with that those candidates aroused such zealous partisanship, at least among people who didn't see their candidate as a potential meal ticket.)

Still, for a lot of us, there came a point at which the Final Two began to separate. Perhaps because the Clinton campaign had been so spectacularly mismanaged, its tone and tactics came increasingly to reflect the squalid character of its inner circle, the people to whom the candidate had entrusted her fate. And they are (hmm, is there a delicate way to put this?) not just stunningly incompetent but some of the vilest people on the planet. True, reports now circulated that those people all hate one another, but then, who could help but hate them?

As the fog cleared, the Clinton campaign came to look eerily like any right-wing hate-and-smear job under the tutelage of Karl Rove. In the official campaign narrative, their candidate was always the saintly victim of unceasing vicious assaults from all sides. But on the ground what was visible was a barrage of innuendo, distortions, and outright lies orchestrated by the Clinton low command.

Most shockingly, Hill 'n' Bill have taken to all but endorsing their dear friend John McCranky in the event that she doesn't win the nomination.

The whole "3am phone call" garbage was always just that. In the one significant foreign-policy test she has faced, the vote to authorize the use of military force in Iraq, she could not possibly have failed more miserably. If she lacked information, it was her own fault--there was plenty of information to be had, and we know now that Sen. Bob Graham, who as ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee had seen the classified stuff, was begging his fellow Democrats to exercise their right to read it too.

True, Clinton had a lot of company among Senate Democrats who chose to take what they thought was the politically easy way out--to go along quietly, assuming that the political risk lay in sticking out their necks to resist the orgy of xenophobia being orchestrated by the White House. For once, though, it has turned out that just maybe there is a price to be paid for indulging in the gutlessness of expediency. Ain't that a kick in the head?

Senator Clinton of course has refused to back down or apologize for anything. Yet she expects us to believe that we should allow her to handle future national-security emergencies. In fact, she and Bill tell us that sooner than Senator Obama we should trust their pal McCranky, whose primitive and disaster-causing views on national security should automatically disqualify him from any public office.

Meanwhile, on the other side, Senator Obama was not only holding his ground but showing signs of emerging as a political figure of stature. As the attacks turned racial, he had one of his finest moments with his speech on race.

Yes, the speech was politically necessary, but he rose above necessity to address the subject frontally, in what could be the opening of the long-needed, long-postponed national conversation on race and racism. Note, by contrast, how Senator Clinton never faces challenges directly; she always sidles around them, tossing out carefully scripted invective and acting out her martyrdom--all so calculated in the delivery that one doesn't know what to believe about what she believes.

In more recent speeches Obama has undertaken some long-overdue rhetorical dismantling of the Bush regime. These are issues on which he might actually be able to bring together politically divided people in ways that might lead to positive action. I'm not getting all misty with optimism, but at least he is giving us something to hope for, while his opponent gives us only reasons for dread.

The real answer to the "3am phone call" nonsense, beyond the character of the candidates, is what kind of administration we could expect them to put together. Looking at the people Senator Clinton has put in charge of her campaign, is it possible to feel anything but horror at the thought of who would have her ear in the White House?

I had a frosty online exchange recently with someone whose sincerity as well as political experience and idealism I genuinely respect. He has, however, drunk the Clinton Kool-Aid, and has cast himself in the role of "honest broker" between factions he chooses to regard as equally responsible for the polarization. He had voiced concern on a political list that irreparable damage to Democratic hopes might be done by refusing to give the Clintonites their way on the Michigan and Florida delegate conundrum, especially as he had "heard say that Obama supporters were directly involved in preventing revotes in FL and MI."

Of course what he'd heard said was Clintonite bullshit propaganda. A more rational list member dismantled the case with regard to Michigan by simply running through the actual situation and sequence of possibilities there. But how do you talk to someone who thinks he's being "even-handed" when in fact he's being played for a sucker?

Here is an only slightly edited version of what I wrote him off-list:

Two thoughts, ---------:

(1) I'm pretty sure that your "I have heard say that" is concealing Clinton supporters. There's no way I can persuade you that I am NOT an "Obama supporter," that I was truly undecided until Clinton began turning herself into as vile and dishonest a candidate as, say, George W. Bush or John McCain. But the fact is that there is a radical difference between Clinton and Obama supporters, and the Clinton people have severed the link with truth and reality. I'm sure that there are many Clinton supporters who are genuinely deluded about reality, but they serve as tools of the flesh-crawlingly monstrous people who run the Clinton campaign, who truly don't give a damn about truth, only about winning. You can be sure that when they talk about Obama people trying to influence the outcome, it's because THEY have been trying thousands of times harder--albeit unsuccessfully--to CONTROL the outcome.

I see that ------- made a much more reasoned response with regard to the MI situation, and that's why she's so valuable to us all. I'll stick with my emotional response. Once we pretend that the Obama and Clinton supporters are comparable, we're trapped in the right-wing "fair and balanced" funhouse mirror.

(2) Someone will have to show me that the FL-and-MI argument isn't 100-percent bullshit. How many months did it take supposedly state-of-the-art "insider" types to grasp the pathetically simple reality that Democrats no longer have winner-take-all primaries, and THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING. By what margins would Clinton have to win in those states to significantly alter the delegate situation?

The only real advantage to Clinton of revotes in FL and MI would be a chance to ratchet up the scorched-earth tactics by which she and Bill clearly plan to put McCain in the White House if she doesn't get the nomination. I wish they gave us any reason to think that they share your wish to keep the party from breaking apart. I'm sort of coming to think that well-meaning initiatives like yours are hopeless precisely because the Clintons and their people have already determined the outcome. If they don't get what they want, they will prove that they SHOULD have.

Best,
Ken

I got a predictably frosty response, indicating that no conversation is possible between us here. But then, I didn't expect any, any more than I thought it was possible to have any sort of conversation with the respectable types of Democrats who adopted the right's meme of "Bush-bashing" as a weapon against those of us who insisted on branding the politics of Bushism as the catastrophe it has been.

My friend Peter makes what I think is a brilliant observation about our Hillary. She has, he suggests, turned into what her enemies always accused her of being. Of course they also accused her of being an ultra-liberal, when she really isn't even any kind of liberal, but Peter suggests thinking of that as just an epithet the Far Right hurls, more or less as a synonym for "evil." I think he's nailed this: She really has turned into the monster the loonies portrayed her as.

At the same time, my friend Leo, who is European, has taken to suggesting that, after all the years in which he's listened to me talk about the mystery of rabid Clinton-hating, it turns out to be surprisingly easy to hate the Clintons. Again, I would like to think that this is a recent development, that what the original Clinton-haters were hating was really something in themselves. But again, I can't disagree. On the basis of their performance in this campaign, I find myself now feeling terrible things about both Hill and Bill.

Nevertheless, I don't see any alternative to voting for Senator Clinton in the event that she wins the nomination. I wish I weren't so persuaded that the feeling isn't reciprocal. But I have hardly any doubt that in the event that she loses the nomination, she intends to prove that she was more "electable" by doing whatever it takes to make sure that her rival doesn't win. After all, all she has to do is directly or indirectly encourage her supporters to sit on their hands in November.


CASE IN POINT: ICKIEST HAROLD'S EXCELLENT
ADVENTURE FOMENTING RACE PANIC

After I wrote the above piece yesterday, Howie called my attention to news of super-slimy Clinton super-stooge Ickiest Harold's happy times trolling for superdelegates by working them into a panic over the Obama guy's race (which became a featured story on last night's Countdown). Class, pure class. Well, they do say the Clintons will do anything to win. These really are easy people to hate.

One thing I thought Obama's race speech accomplished--by couching his appeal in the form of an optimistic, inspirational exhortation that we Americans are better than that and can rise above these meaningless distinctions--was to begin to force irredeemable bigots out into the open, effectively declaring their irredeemability. You know, people like Rupert Murdoch (who thoughtfully pointed out that African-Americans haven't accomplished a darned thing) and Pat Buchanan (who's demanding to know why African-Americans haven't yet had the grace to thank white Americans for enslaving them).

Among others.

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