by Jane Smiley | Posted March 9, 2008 | Huffington Post
It's become clear over the last week that the more Hillary Clinton is pressed, the more she reveals her true self. The fact that this self is unscrupulous is bad enough, but the fact that her whole campaign for the last year has been predicated on positioning, spin, and other varieties of public relations is worse. In fact, it is not only worse, it is Bushian, and that is the worst. Even though Clinton won two and a half contests of the four staged on Tuesday, her campaign strategists are fighting among themselves, her campaign is in a turmoil, and, it seems, they can't decide which tack to take. Should they try the lying (about NAFTA, about Obama's religion)? Should they try the cheating (trying to seat delegates from the Florida and Michigan primaries)? Should they try the fear-mongering (the red telephone ad)? Should they try the sucking up to Republicans (spelling out similarities between Clinton and cheerleader-for-war McCain)?
No one ever said that the Clintons weren't corrupt. Even they didn't say that. The only questions were 1) Were they less corrupt than the Republicans and 2) Did they combine at least a modicum of compassion and interest in the public good with their corruption? Back in the 90s, I felt that, on balance, Bill Clinton was openly compassionate, and that his corruption did not fatally taint his administration. At any rate, he did not GLORY in corruption as Reagan and Bush 1 and their advisors did. I also felt that after the Reagan Revolution (excuse me, I meant to say Reagan Devolution), triangulation was the only way to get anything done, and so they did it.
But Hillary Clinton seems to have learned the wrong lesson from her Senatorial success. The lesson she has learned is that Republicans such as McCain are more her friends than Senators with progressive principles. As a result, it now appears that Clinton and McCain stand together on one side of a divide, and Barack Obama stands on the other side of that divide. The divide is between the inside-the-beltway ruling class, who can see no reason of any kind that they should give up the power they have accumulated and the avenue to wealth that it represents, and the citizenry of the country, who in every poll insist that the country is headed in the wrong direction. In the last week, Clinton has put herself on McCain's ticket, attacking the change that Obama promises and seems poised to deliver (whether or not he can remains an open question), and promising more more more of the same of what we have had for the last thirty years. More of the same is exactly what almost everyone does not want, but Clinton tells us everyday in every way that that is what we will get -- what we have had is what she touts as her "experience". What we see in her campaign is that we will get the same old same old with an added measure of chaos.
Clinton, of course, is not Cheney. Dick Cheney is the mad master of corruption, a person who literally doesn't know what integrity is. But Hillary is too smart not to know, and she has made up her mind to shelve her integrity for the sake of ambition. And let me be clear what I mean by corruption -- I have no idea what her financial gains have been over the years, and I don't care. What I mean by corruption is any and all support of the criminal policies of the Republicans while calling herself a Democrat, in order to gain power.
Some weeks ago, I wrote a Huff post about a remark Bill Clinton made, that if Hillary became the nominee, the presidential campaign would be exceptionally "polite". We now see that he wasn't joking. Both Clintons are in favor of the status quo, and will fight tooth and nail to maintain it. They are surrounded by advisors who both literally and figuratively are married to the Republicans. They are, indeed, now part of the "vast right wing conspiracy".
One of the key questions about the Democrats since the 2006 elections is, where do their loyalties really lie? Time and again they have failed to stop the Republicans, or settled for a little populist embroidery around the edges of policies that by and large serve to increase the power of the Republicans. Their excuse, which is growing thin, is that they don't have the power to confront Bush. Hillary Clinton is now showing their real agenda -- preserving the status quo at the expense of the military, the taxpayers, the economy, world peace, and the rule of law.
Obama is not a known quantity. I have seen him one time and listened to one speech, and I was reasonably impressed by that speech. But Hillary Clinton is a known quantity. If you like the world that the Bushes and Clintons have made in the last twenty years, then you should by all means vote for her. But as of this week, I don't see her as the person I want answering the red phone.
Jane Smiley is a novelist and essayist. Her novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, and her novel The All True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. Her novel Horse Heaven was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002. She has contributed to a wide range of magazines, including The New Yorker, Elle, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The American Prospect, Practical Horseman, The Guardian Sport Monthly, Real Simple, and Playboy. Smiley's latest book is Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, a history and anatomy of the novel as a literary form (Knopf). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
