Hillary & The Clinton Legacy

[Patrick Degan]

In the course of an increasingly desperate, quixiotic campaign for the presidency, it can be said that Hillary Clinton, almost singlehandedly, is managing what the GOP, with six-plus years, a huge propaganda apparatus, a special prosecutor willing to subvert justice to succeed, the most vitriolically partisan Congress in American history, and 50-60 million taxpayer dollars in the effort, failed to accomplish —the permanent overshadowing or tarnishment if not the actual destruction of the Bill Clinton legacy.

Clinton managed to leave the White House with 60-70% approval and remained hugely popular as an ex-president, easily eclipsing Chimpus Caesar except during the height of its manufactured popular patriotism in the post-911 wake and the nation's spell of victory disease in Iraq in 2004. But thanks to Hillary (and with some help from Bill with a couple of stupid remarks of his own), that legacy is being displaced for the one of a former first lady who is willing to destroy her own party in pursuit of history, who clearly cannot separate her interests from the best interests of both party and country, and who has run an increasingly tawdry, ugly, and pointless campaign for a chance at the presidency which started fading back in March and which will not be coming for her ever again. And instead of seeing sense, Hillary is bound and determined to use any means whatsoever to try to rescue her own chance at the Big Chair. Even if it means splitting Democratic voters along racial and class lines. Even if it means handing The Gimp and his GOP handlers all the ammunition they could possibly want to use against her. Even if it means essentially throwing the 2008 election and guaranteeing another four years of GOP misrule. Even if it means discouraging activism and any remaining enthusiasm citizens may still harbour for the electoral process and sending the country into the doldrums of apathy and oligarchy for perhaps as much as another quarter century, after which America will be barely recognisable even as the country it was in the time of President Bill Clinton.

And even if Hillary is somehow prevailed upon to at last re-embrace sanity and yield the stage, the wretched conduct of her campaign ensures that the name "Clinton" will invoke memories not of Bill's presidency as much as Hillary's shabby grasping for power and servicing of her own ego. Nobody will even remember her for her record either as first lady or New York senator but rather for this pathetic campaign of hers to make history as the first woman president of the United States.

She has become a caricature.

[Coyote]

I have to agree with this assessment; if the Democrats retake government in general, it will be despite her and anything she and Bill managed to accomplish in the Good Years.

That the Democratic Party is not yet split among those racial and class lines, and is in fact growing under a new organizational structure made by Barack Obama's campaign, is a testament to not just Obama but the determination of the voters for change and the way that a whole new generation of new voters have been brought into the process.

Hillary seems to have underestimated a numbe rof things, not just Obama. There is a whole young generation of voters now who don't have much memory of the Clinton presidencey and are not beholden to them; for these young voters the Clintons are just another blur of faces in history books. They were alive back then, sure, but not forming political awareness so much. She also seems to have misunderstood how quickly little things said in small forums are immediately siezed on and dispersed through the internet, like Bill's South Carolina comments.

Obama sidestepped a lot of the usual political ramp-ups and went right for a 50-state voter registration drive and volunteer drive everywhere Hillary concentrated on a handful of "key point" states and donors --old school politics. "Line up states XYZ and donors ABC and you can ignore the rest."

She's nailed her own coffin, hers and Bill's. Maybe Chelsea has a chance in 30 years!