If He’s a Pit Bull Terrier, Then What Does That Make His Wife
See if I can get this saved inside a window of server-uppedness…
In her sharply insightful book, For Love of Politics, Sally Bedell Smith dissects the Clinton relationship, and says it is less like a traditional marriage and more like a vast and successful corporation that dominates the business of American politics. For eight years Bill was the President and Chief Executive Officer while Hillary was the top manager. When he left office, Hillary moved up to the CEO’s suite and Bill took over as non-executive chairman. Now, the country is being invited to accept another takeover offer from Clinton Incorporated.
And so when the upstart young black senator from Illinois attempted to lead something of a shareholders’ revolt against the proposal, he met the full force of the Clintons’ wrath. Bill Clinton has been unleashed on the Obama candidacy like an ageing but still ferocious pitbull let loose on an elegant but slightly diffident Great Dane.
Starting when Mrs Clinton was at her low point just before the New Hampshire primary, the former President has sunk his teeth into the Obama hide and never let go. He dismissed Mr Obama’s patently true claim that he had been the only candidate to firmly oppose the Iraq war from the start as “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen”. In Nevada last week he virtually accused Mr Obama of rigging the vote in the Democratic caucuses there. And it was indeed, as Mrs Clinton gleefully pointed out in that South Carolina debate, her husband who has been accusing Mr Obama of the mortal Democratic sin of saying nice things about Ronald Reagan.
I dunno. Everyone keeps saying how nasty this campaign is getting, but honestly I don’t think it’s that bad.
The spectacle has been unprecedented. When George W.Bush ran for president in 2000, his father, former President George H.W.Bush, who had himself been mauled by the Clintons in 1992, pointedly stayed out of the campaign. That might simply owe more to better breeding in the Brahmin Bushes from New England than you find in the dysfunctional family of street-brawling strivers from Arkansas. But it also true proof of how much is at stake for both Clintons this time.
Now you can think - as many Democrats do - that a return to the Clinton years is precisely what a battered and disillusioned America needs today. …
But Bill Clinton’s behaviour these past couple of weeks ought by now to be flashing warning signs for American voters. It is not just that his egregious interventions in the campaign have revived the near certain prospect of a demoralising replay of the stomach-churning bitterness and vicious partisanship of the 1990s - not all of which was the Clintons’ fault.
It is that, if nothing else, the history of America, from its very founding, has been a history of the struggle to constrain the appetites of powerful men - and occasionally women. It was this fear of the monarchical tendency that persuaded Americans more than 50 years ago to limit presidents to two terms in office.
By cleverly reincorporating themselves as a political institution in their own right, the Clintons are offering an extra-constitutional detour around this impediment. Her husband’s evident role in his family’s restoration should give any reasonable American pause when considering the virtues of Mrs Clinton’s own claim to the presidency.
Gerard really doesn’t like the Clintons.
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