STATESBORO, GEORGIA – Hillary Rodham Clinton’s bid to become the first female President of the United States is both doomed and certain. Lost in a summer swoon anybody could’ve predicted, nobody could’ve known just how bad it would get.
October 22nd she will testify in front of Congress as to her actions as Secretary State during the attack on the consulates in Benghazi, Libya.
Questions are mounting regarding her missing and deleted E-mails on a private server.
Wall Street Journal reports that after Clinton helped Swiss bank UBS with an IRS dispute it paid her husband $1.5 million dollars in speaking fees.
To boot, there’s a new Clinton “tell-all” book coming out – there’s always a new Clinton tell-all book coming out – that quotes secret service agents as saying that Bill has a longtime “busty mistress” and Hillary is “abusive” and that, as many have speculated anyway, their relationship is “business…It’s not a marriage at all. It’s a total fake, like everything else about Hillary. It’s just a big show and a scam.”
Makes sense then that Hillary’s favorables and unfavorables are so bad. Right now, 43% of the electorate likes her and 48% do not, which is even worse when you consider a CNN finding that 57% of Americans find her untrustworthy. These numbers are absolutely abysmal, some of the worst a prohibitive favorite for a nomination has ever had. The scariest thing of all though is that these are numbers that probably have more to do with Clinton’s personality than any one single scandal.
Right now, the narratives haunting the HRC campaign are the kind that most Americans don’t actively seek out to understand. The majority of them have to do with diplomatic limitations, chains of command and political linguistics, even the sordid world of international finance and soft quid-pro-quo. There isn’t a lot of red meat here, which is probably why there’s still an HRC campaign to speak of at all.
Eventually though, there’s a real possibility of Clinton Fatigue, a condition which will set in once the country tires of the constant barrage of scandals and news items breaking every single day. It’s a distant cousin of the Closed-Loop Phenomenon that’s currently propelling Donald Trump to the tops of the polls but will one day inevitably destroy his candidacy. Both are born from the cycle’s voracity and dependence on breaking news and the undisciplined approaches of their particular candidates.
Trump will fail because he can’t keep his mouth shut.
Hillary could very well fail because she can’t help it.
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Bill and Hillary Clinton, America’s favorite tabloid-political couple, were born in 1946 and 1947 respectively, putting them solidly in the Baby Boom Generation, a group who grew up in post-war America and came to age in the turbulent Sixties and Seventies. Both were active in politics early – Bill winning class president at Georgetown before protesting the Vietnam War and Hillary beginning as a disciple of Conservative firebrand Barry Goldwater before finding her voice at Wellesley as a moderate who supported Republican Nelson Rockefeller, and actually attended the 1968 Republican Convention, where she was turned to liberalism by Richard Nixon – and came to maturity in one of the most volatile political ages in American history.
Boomers of their ilk tend to fall into one of three categories primarily: Conservatives who remained Right throughout their lives, Liberals who remained Left throughout theirs, or Liberals who abhorred Nixon but found his methods and principles useful in achieving their goals, if not desirable altogether.
This philosophical split now plays itself out in our national discourse every single year as we see the remaining Baby Boomers tussle for control of the federal government and basically argue and re-argue the distorted and disgraceful tradition of Nixon and Post-Nixon politics. The true-blue Liberals have more or less receded to the background in the era of Banks and Citizens United while the Conservatives and Machinery-Minded Democrats have excelled at fighting for the wheel they’ll both steer more or less identically.
Let it be said that no Machinery-Minded Democrats have had more success than the Clintons. They have somehow or another wrangled their Arkansas roots, in conjunction with the remnants of the damage Nixon did with his Southern Strategy throughout the Sixties, and mixed it with tweaks of populism to create one of the most recognizable and lauded brands of politics of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century.
For all the talk of The Man From Hope, Bill Clinton was a center president and predicated his entire re-election on veering hard right at the behest of his close advisor and Conservative Bridge Troll Dick Morris. Don’t forget, Clinton started Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, he gave more leverage to Wall Street and Big Banks, he was the one who passed NAFTA and doomed American manufacturing forever and ever. While he amassed a veritable mountain’s worth of bodies and skeletons, the face of the administration was the very definition of Boomer Cool, what with Clinton donning shades and playing saxophone on the airwaves.
All of the traits of Sixties Cool on display for mainstream, unhip America.
Hillary doesn’t play sax and she doesn’t particularly play nice very well either. The charm Bill laid on the public for most of his eights years was his personal power, a talent he could ply with the best of them. Hillary is the bulldog of the pair, the perpetual fighter of Clinton World who was the shoulder and the brunt behind all of their goals. Bill gladhanded voters in ‘92 and she steered the policy. Bill backslapped donors for the Clinton Foundation in 2001 while she pushed the agenda.
Much like Hillary has suffered the affects of Bill’s predilections since they entered the Arkansas State House, she now has to not only overcome her own charm deficiency, but also with all the remnants and skeletons of their machinery. Hillary’s carrying roughly forty years worth of Bill’s machinations on her back, not to mention the ones she’s accumulated in the past twenty.
And know this: when you wake up in a dingy motel and you can literally feel the heat is on in town, the answer is never to linger. You must run as far away from the scene of the crime as possible.
Hillary?
She’s running straight into the heart of it.
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There’s no telling what straw could break this camel’s back.
Right now, it could be something as simple as an unpaid parking ticket in Dubai.
An errant call to a donor in the middle of the night asking for twenty million in unmarked bills for a slush fund promoting a project “most dire.”
Honestly, there’s no angle Hillary and Bill wouldn’t try. Much like Dick Nixon, who employed his Plumbers and Ratfuckers to break into offices and spread misinformation, and considered framing rival George McGovern for the assassination attempt on George Wallace in 1972, they can plumb to the deaths of morality and ethics because of one simple fact: they think it’s worth it.
The Clintons don’t engage in this kind of behavior because they’re evil. It’s hard to imagine either one of them gloating or reveling in the destruction of a person or idea or movement, but at the heart of this unraveling ball of yarn is a deeply-held belief each of them holds that they are important, that they Know Best and are needed to fix everything and all things from here and until forever.
Narcissism is a funny thing. Regular people afflicted believe they’re meant for special things while leaders – those blessed with either charisma or unrivaled intelligence or just the mean spirit of a junkyard dog – are able to harness the delusion and make it tangible by personal will alone. The Clintons are among the most talented people in the world at doing this. Bill’s ascendency from dirt-poor Arkansas to the Highest Office In The Land is testimony, as is their foundation which raises over two hundred million dollars a year in the mission to “Bring people together to take on the biggest challenges of the 21st century.”
Simply put, they are trying to save the world, and Boomer philosophy will tell you: if you can save the world but have to break a few backs along the way, isn’t it worth it?
I can’t tell you what the answer is on that one. International politics and global diplomacy are big jobs, larger than most of us can handle. After all, isn’t it a plus-gain if by helping an international conglomerate out of a tax jam you get millions for relief? The ethical implications of every decision, whether it’s war or famine or the challenge of global climate change, are so large and at such a level that the mind reels at the very consideration.
But, no matter how complicated or intricate the answers, and regardless of how many times you must answer them, one question always remains: where do you bury all the bodies?
Photo: Hillary Clinton’s Underground Communications Center by DonkeyHotey
